Part + 

I + 

I + 

A string of vehicles moved slowly out of the New Town, taking the road over the long, low slope of the Ridge to the plains. + 

Nothing was moving on the wide stretch of the plains or under the fine, clear blue sky of early spring, except this train of shabby, dust-covered vehicles. The road, no more than a track of wheels on shingly earth, wound lazily through paper daisies growing in drifts beside it, and throwing a white coverlet to the dim, circling horizon. The faint, dry fragrance of paper daisies was in the air; a native cuckoo calling. + 

The little girl sitting beside Michael Brady in Newton’s buggy glanced behind her now and then. Michael was driving the old black horse from the coach stables and Newton’s bay mare, and Sophie and her father were sitting beside him on the front seat. In the open back of the buggy behind them lay a long box with wreaths and bunches of paper daisies and budda blossoms over it. + 

Sophie knew all the people on the road, and to whom the horses and buggies they had borrowed belonged. Jun Johnson and Charley Heathfield were riding together in the Afghan storekeeper’s sulky with his fat white pony before them. Anwah Kaked and Mrs. Kaked had the store cart themselves. Watty and Mrs. Frost were on the coach. Ed Ventry was driving them and had put up the second seat for George and Mrs. Woods and Maggie Grant. Peter Newton and Cash Wilson followed in Newton’s newly varnished black sulky. Sam Nancarrow had given Martha M’Cready a lift, and Pony-Fence Inglewood was driving Mrs. Archie and Mrs. Ted Cross in Robb’s old heavy buggy, with the shaggy draught mare used for carting water in the township during the summer, in the shafts. The Flails’ homemade jinker, whose body was painted a dull yellow, came last of the vehicles on the road. Sophie could just see Arthur Henty and two or three stockmen from Warria riding through a thin haze of red dust. But she knew men were walking two abreast behind the vehicles and horsemen⁠—Bill Grant, Archie and Ted Cross, and a score of miners from the Three Mile and the Punti rush. At a curve of the road she had seen Snowshoes and Potch straggling along behind the others, the old man stooping to pick wild flowers by the roadside, and Potch plodding on, looking straight in front of him. + 

Buggies, horses, and people, they had come all the way from her home at the Old Town. Almost everybody who lived on Fallen Star Ridge was there, driving, riding, or walking on the road across the plains behind Michael, her father, and herself. It was all so strange to Sophie; she felt so strange in the black dress she had on and which Mrs. Grant had cut down from one of her own. There was a black ribbon on her old yellow straw hat too, and she had on a pair of black cotton gloves. + 

Sophie could not believe her mother was what they called “dead”; that it was her mother in the box with flowers on just behind her. They had walked along this very road, singing and gathering wild flowers, and had waited to watch the sun set, or the moon rise, so often. + 

She glanced at her father. He was sitting beside her, a piece of black stuff on his arm and a strip of the same material round his old felt hat. The tears poured down his cheeks, and he shook out the large, new, white handkerchief he had bought at Chassy Robb’s store that morning, and blew his nose every few minutes. He spoke sometimes to Michael; but Michael did not seem to hear him. Michael sat staring ahead, his face as though cut in wood. + 

Sophie remembered Michael had been with her when Mrs. Grant said.⁠ ⁠… Her mind went back over that. + 

“She’s dead, Michael,” Mrs. Grant had said. + 

And she had leaned against the window beside her mother’s bed, crying. Michael was on his knees by the bed. Sophie had thought Michael looked so funny, kneeling like that, with his head in his hands, his great heavy boots jutting up from the floor. The light, coming in through the window near the head of the bed, shone on the nails in the soles of his boots. It was so strange to see these two people whom she knew quite well, and whom she had only seen doing quite ordinary, everyday things, behaving like this. Sophie had gazed at her mother who seemed to be sleeping. Then Mrs. Grant had come to her, her face working, tears streaming down her cheeks. She had taken her hand and they had gone out of the room together. Sophie could not remember what Mrs. Grant had said to her then.⁠ ⁠… After a little while Mrs. Grant had gone back to the room where her mother was, and Sophie went out to the lean-to where Potch was milking the goats. + 

She told him what Mrs. Grant had said about her mother, and he stopped milking. They had gazed at each other with inquiry and bewilderment in their eyes; then Potch turned his face away as he sat on the milking-stool, and Sophie knew he was crying. She wondered why other people had cried so much and she had not cried at all. + 

When Potch was taking the bucket of milk across the yard, her father had come round the corner of the house. His heavy figure with its broad, stooping shoulders was outlined against the twilight sky. He made for the door, shouting incoherently. Sophie and Potch stood still as they saw him. + 

Catching sight of them, he had turned and come towards them. + 

“We’re on opal,” he cried; “on opal!” + 

There was a feverish light in his eyes; he was trembling with excitement. + 

He had pulled a small, washed oatmeal bag from his pocket, untied the string, tumbled some stones on to the outstretched palm of his hand, and held them for Potch to look at. + 

“Not a bad bit in the lot.⁠ ⁠… Look at the fire, there in the black potch!⁠ ⁠… And there’s green and gold for you. A lovely bit of pattern! And look at this⁠ ⁠… and this!” he cried eagerly, going over the two or three small knobbies in his hand. + 

Potch looked at him dazedly. + 

“Didn’t they tell you⁠—?” he began. + 

Her father had closed his hands over the stones and opal dirt. + 

“I’m going in now,” he said, thrusting the opals into the bag. + 

He had gone towards the house again, shouting: “We’re on opal! On opal!” + 

Sophie followed him indoors. Mrs. Grant had met her father on the threshold of the room where her mother was. + 

“Why didn’t you come when I sent for you?” she asked. + 

“I didn’t think it could be as bad as you made out⁠—that she was really dying,” Sophie could hear her father saying again. “And we’d just struck opal, me and Jun, struck it rich. Got two or three stones already⁠—great stuff, lovely pattern, green and orange, and fire all through the black potch. And there’s more of it! Heaps more where it came from, Jun says. We’re next Watty and George Woods⁠—and no end of good stuff’s come out of that claim.” + 

Mrs. Grant stared at him as Potch had done. Then she stood back from the doorway of the room behind her. + 

Every gesture of her father’s, of Mrs. Grant’s, and of Michael’s, was photographed on Sophie’s brain. She could see that room again⁠—the quiet figure on the bed, light golden-brown hair, threaded with silver, lying in thin plaits beside the face of yellow ivory; bare, thin arms and hands lying over grey blankets and a counterpane of faded red twill; the window still framing a square of twilight sky on which stars were glittering. Mrs. Grant had brought a candle and put it on the box near the bed, and the candle light had flared on Mrs. Grant’s figure, showing it, gaunt and accusing, against the shadows of the room. It had showed Sophie her father, also, between Michael and Mrs. Grant, looking from one to the other of them, and to the still figure on the bed, with a dazed, penitent expression.⁠ ⁠… + 

The horses jogged slowly on the long, winding road. Sophie was conscious of the sunshine, warm and bright, over the plains, the fragrance of paper daisies in the air; the cuckoos calling in the distance. Her father snuffled and wiped his eyes and nose with his new handkerchief as he sat beside her. + 

“She was so good, Michael,” he said, “too good for this world.” + 

Michael did not reply. + 

“Too good for this world!” Paul murmured again. + 

He had said that at least a score of times this morning. Sophie had heard him say it to people down at the house before they started. She had never heard him talk of her mother like that before. She looked at him, sensing vaguely, and resenting the banality. She thought of him as he had always been with her mother and with her, querulous and complaining, or noisy and rough when he had been drinking. They had spent the night in a shed at the back of the house sometimes when he was like that.⁠ ⁠… + 

And her mother had said: + 

“You’ll take care of Sophie, Michael?” + 

Sophie remembered how she had stood in the doorway of her mother’s room, that afternoon⁠—How long ago was it? Not only a day surely? She had stood there until her mother had seen her, awed without knowing why, reluctant to move, afraid almost. Michael had nodded without speaking. + 

“As though she were your own child?” + 

“So help me, God,” Michael said. + 

Her-mother’s eyes had rested on Michael’s face. She had smiled at him. Sophie did not think she had ever seen her smile like that before, although her smile had always been like a light on her face. + 

“Don’t let him take her away,” her mother had said after a moment. “I want her to grow up in this place⁠ ⁠… in the quiet⁠ ⁠… never to know the treacherous⁠ ⁠… whirlpool⁠ ⁠… of life beyond the Ridge.” + 

Then her mother had seen and called to her. + 

Sophie glanced back at the slowly-moving train of vehicles. They had a dreary, dreamlike aspect. She felt as if she were moving in a dream. Everything she saw, and heard, and did, was invested with unreality; she had a vague, unfeeling curiosity about everything. + 

“You see, Michael,” her father was saying when she heard him talking again, “we’d just got out that big bit when Potch came and said that Marya⁠ ⁠… that Marya.⁠ ⁠… I couldn’t believe it was true⁠ ⁠… and there was the opal! And when I got home in the evening she was gone. My poor Marya! And I’d brought some of the stones to show her.” + 

He broke down and wept. “Do you think she knows about the opal, Michael?” + 

Michael did not reply. Sophie looked up at him. The pain of his face, a sudden passionate grieving that wrung it, translated to her what this dying of her mother meant. She huddled against Michael; in all her trouble and bewilderment there seemed nothing to do but to keep close to Michael. + 

And so they came to the gate of a fenced plot which was like a quiet garden on the plains. Several young coolebahs, and two or three older trees standing in it, scattered light shade; and a few headstones and wooden crosses, painted white or bleached by the weather, showed above the waving grass and wild flowers. + 

Sophie held the reins when Michael got down to open the gate. Then he took his seat again and they drove in through the gateway. Other people tied their horses and buggies to the fence outside. + 

When all the people who had been driving, riding, or walking on the road went towards an old coolebah under which the earth had been thrown up and a grave had been dug, Michael told Sophie to go with her father and stand beside them. She did so, and dull, grieving eyes were turned to her; glances of pitiful sympathy. But Snowshoes came towards the little crowd beside the tree, singing. + 

He was the last person to come into the cemetery, and everybody stared at him. An old man in worn white moleskins and cotton shirt, an old white felt hat on his head, the wrappings of bag and leather, which gave him his name, on his feet⁠—although snow never fell on the Ridge⁠—he swung towards them. The flowers he had gathered as he came along, not otilypaper daisies, but the blue flowers of crowsfoot, gold buttons, and creamy and lavender, sweet-scented budda blossoms, were done up in a tight little bunch in his hand. He drew nearer still singing under his breath, and Sophie realised he was going over and over the fragment of a song that her mother had loved and used often to sing herself. + 

There was a curious smile in his eyes as he came to a standstill beside her. The leaves of the coolebah were bronze and gold in the sunshine, a whitetail in its branches reiterating plaintively: “Sweet pretty creature! Sweet pretty creature!” Michael, George Woods, Archie Cross, and Cash Wilson, came towards the tree, their shoulders bowed beneath the burden they were carrying; but Snowshoes smiled at everybody as though this were really a joyous occasion, and they did not understand. Only he understood, and smiled because of his secret knowledge. + 

II + 

In a week or two Mrs. Rouminof’s name had dropped out of Ridge life almost as if she had never been part of it. + 

At first people talked of her, of Paul, of Sophie, and of Michael. They gossiped of her looks and manner, of her strange air of serenity and content, although her life on the Ridge was, they surmised, a hard one, and different from the life she had come from. But her death caused no more disturbance than a stone thrown into quiet water, falling to the bottom, does. No one was surprised, when it was known Paul and Sophie had gone to live with Michael. Everyone expected Michael would try to look after them for a while, although they could not imagine where he was going to find room for them in his small house filled with books. + 

It was natural enough that Michael should have taken charge of Sophie and Rouminof, and that he should have made all arrangements for Mrs. Rouminof’s funeral. If it had been left to Paul to bury his wife, people agreed, she would not have been buried at all; or, at least, not until the community insisted. And Michael would have done as much for any shiftless man. He was next-of-kin to all lonely and helpless men and women on the Ridge, Michael Brady. + 

Every man, woman, or child on the Ridge knew Michael. His lean figure in shabby blue dungarees, faded shirt, and weathered felt hat, with no more than a few threads of its band left, was as familiar as any tree, shed, or dump on the fields. He walked with a slight stoop, a pipe in his mouth always, his head bent as though he were thinking hard; but there was no hard thought in his eyes, only meditativeness, and a faint smile if he were stopped and spoken to unexpectedly. + 

“You’re a regular ’cyclopaedia, Michael,” the men said sometimes when he, had given information on a subject they were discussing. + 

“Not me,” Michael would reply as often as not. “I just came across that in a book I was reading the other day.” + 

Ridge folk were proud of Michael’s books, and strangers who saw his miscellaneous collection⁠—mostly of cheap editions, old school books, and shilling, sixpenny, and penny publications of literary masterpieces, poetry, and works on industrial and religious subjects⁠—did not wonder that it impressed Ridge folk, or that Michael’s knowledge of the world and affairs was what it was. He had tracts, leaflets, and small books on almost every subject under the sun. Books were regarded as his weakness, and, remembering it, some of the men, when they had struck opal and left the town, occasionally sent a box of any old books they happened to come across to Michael, knowing that a printed page was a printed page to him in the long evenings when he lay on the sofa under his window. Michael himself had spent all the money he could, after satisfying the needs of his everyday life, on those tracts, pamphlets, and cheap books he hoarded in his hut on shelves made from wooden boxes and old fruit-cases. + 

But there was nothing of the schoolmaster about him. He rarely gave information unless he was asked for it. The men appreciated that, although they were proud of his erudition and books. They knew dimly but surely that Michael used his books for, not against, themselves; and he was attached to books and learning, chiefly for what they could do for them, his mates. In all community discussions his opinion carried considerable weight. A matter was often talked over with more or less heat, differences of opinion thrashed out while Michael smoked and listened, weighing the arguments. He rarely spoke until his view was asked for. Then in a couple of minutes he would straighten out the subject of controversy, show what was to be said for and against a proposition, sum up, and give his conclusions, for or against it. + 

Michael Brady, however, was much more the general utility man than encyclopaedia of Fallen Star Ridge. If a traveller⁠—swagman⁠—died on the road, it was Michael who saw he got a decent burial; Michael who was sent for if a man had his head smashed in a brawl, or a wife died unexpectedly. He was the court of final appeal in quarrels and disagreements between mates; and once when Martha M’Cready was away in Sydney, he had even brought a baby into the world. He was something of a dentist, too, honorary dentist to anyone on the Ridge who wanted a tooth pulled out; and the friend of any man, woman, or child in distress. + 

And he did things so quietly, so much as a matter of course, that people did not notice what he did for them, or for the rest of the Ridge. They took it for granted he liked doing what he did; that he liked helping them. It was his sympathy, the sense of his oneness with all their lives, and his shy, whimsical humour and innate refusal to be anything more than they were, despite his books and the wisdom with which they were quite willing to credit him, that gained for Michael the regard of the people of the Ridge, and made him the unconscious power he was in the community. + 

Of about middle height, and sparely built, Michael was forty-five, or thereabouts, when Mrs. Rouminof died. He looked older, yet had the vigour and energy of a much younger man. Crowsfeet had gathered at the corners of his eyes, and there were the fines beneath them which all back-country men have from screwing their sight against the brilliant sunshine of the northwest. But the white of his eyes was as clear as the shell of a bird’s egg, the irises grey, flecked with hazel and green, luminous, and ringed with fine black lines. When he pushed back his hat, half a dozen lines from frowning against the glare were on his forehead too. His thin, black hair, streaked with grey, lay flat across and close to his head. He had a well-shaped nose and the sensitive nostrils of a thoroughbred, although Michael himself said he was no breed to speak of, but plain Australian⁠—and proud of it. His father was born in the country, and so was his mother. His father had been a teemster, and his mother a storekeeper’s daughter. Michael had wandered from one mining field to another in his young days. He had worked in Bendigo and Gippsland; later in Silver Town; and from the Barrier Ranges had migrated to Chalk Cliffs, and from the Cliffs to Fallen Star Ridge. He had been one of the first comers to the Ridge when opal was discovered there. + 

The Rouminofs had been on Chalk Cliffs too, and had come to the Ridge in the early days of the rush. Paul had set up at the Cliffs as an opal buyer, it was said; but he knew very little about opal. Anybody could sell him a stone for twice as much as it was worth, and he could never get a price from other buyers for the stones he bought. He soon lost any money he possessed, and had drifted and swung with the careless life of the place. He had worked as a gouger for a while when the blocks were bought up. Then when the rush to the Ridge started, and most of the men tramped north to try their luck on the new fields, he went with them; and Mrs. Rouminof and Sophie followed a little later on Ed Ventry’s bullock wagon, when Ed was taking stores to the rush. + 

Mrs. Rouminof had lived in a hut at the Old Town even after the township was moved to the eastern slope of the Ridge. She had learnt a good deal about opal on the Cliffs, and soon after she came to the Ridge set up a cutting-wheel, and started cutting and polishing stones. Several of the men brought her their stones, and after a while she was so good at her work that she often added a couple of pounds to the value of a stone. She kept a few goats too, to assure a means of livelihood when there was no opal about, and she sold goats’ milk and butter in the township. She had never depended on Rouminof to earn a living, which was just as well, Fallen Star folk agreed, since, as long as they had known him, he had never done so. For a long time he had drifted between the mines and Newton’s, cadging drinks or borrowing money from anybody who would lend to him. Sometimes he did odd jobs at Newton’s or the mail stables for the price of a few drinks; but no man who knew him would take up a claim, or try working a mine with him. + 

His first mate on the Ridge had been Pony-Fence Inglewood. They sank a hole on a likely spot behind the Old Town; but Paul soon got tired of it. When they had not seen anything but bony potch for a while, Paul made up his mind there was nothing in the place. Pony-Fence rather liked it. He was for working a little longer, but to oblige his mate he agreed to sink again. Soon after they had started, Paul began to appear at the dump when the morning was half through, or not at all. Or, as often as not, when he did decide to sling a pick, or dig a bit, he groaned so about the pains in his back or his head that as often as not Pony-Fence told him to go home and get the missus to give him something for it. + 

The mildest man on the fields, Pony-Fence Inglewood did not discover for some time what the boys said was correct. There was nothing the matter with Rum-Enough but a dislike of shifting mullock if he could get anyone to shift it for him. When he did discover he was doing the work of the firm, Pony-Fence and Paul had it out with each other, and parted company. Pony-Fence took a new mate, Bully Bryant, a youngster from Budda, who was anxious to put any amount of elbow grease into his search for a fortune, and Paul drifted. He had several mates afterwards, newcomers to the fields, who wanted someone to work with them, but they were all of the same opinion about him. + 

“Tell Rum-Enough there’s a bit of colour about, and he’ll work like a chow,” they said; “but if y’ don’t see anything for a day or two, he goes as flat as the day before yesterday.” + 

If he had been working, and happened on a knobby, or a bit of black potch with a light or two in it, Paul was like a child, crazy with happiness. He could talk of nothing else. He thought of nothing else. He slung his pick and shovelled dirt as long as you would let him, with a devouring impatience, in a frenzy of eagerness. The smallest piece of stone with no more than sun-flash was sufficient to put him in a state of frantic excitement. + 

Strangers to the Ridge sometimes wanted to know whether Rouminof had ever had a touch of the sun. But Ridge folk knew he was not mad. He had the opal fever all right, they said, but he was not mad. + 

When Jun Johnson blew along at the end of one summer and could not get anyone to work with him, he took Paul on. The two chummed up and started to sink a hole together, and the men made bets as to the chance of their ever getting ten or a dozen feet below ground; but before long they were astounded to see the old saw of setting a thief to catch a thief working true in this instance. If anybody was loafing on the new claim, it was not Rouminof. He did every bit of his share of the first day’s hard pick work and shovelling. If anybody was slacking, it was Jun rather than Paul. Jun kept his mate’s nose to the grindstone, and worked more successfully with him than anyone else had ever done. He knew it, too, and was proud of his achievement. Joking over it at Newton’s in the evening, he would say: + 

“Great mate I’ve got now! Work? Never saw a chow work like him! Work his fingers to the bone, he would, if I’d let him. It’s a great life, a gouger’s, if only you’ve got the right sort of mate!” + 

Ordinarily, of course, mates shared their finds. There was no question of what partners would get out of the luck of one or the other. But Jun⁠—he had his own little way of doing business, everybody knew. He had been on the Ridge before. He and his mate did not have any sensational luck, but they had saved up two or three packets of opal and taken them down to Sydney to sell. Old Bill Olsen was his mate then, and, although Bill had said nothing of the business, the men guessed there had been something shady about it. Jun had his own story of what happened. He said the old chap had “got on his ear” in Sydney, and that “a couple of spielers had rooked him of his stones.” But Bill no longer noticed Jun if they passed each other on the same track on the Ridge, and Jun pretended to be sore about it. + 

“It’s dirt,” he said, “the old boy treating me as if I had anything to do with his bad luck losin’ those stones!” + 

“Why don’t you speak to him about it?” somebody asked. + 

“Oh, we had it out in Sydney,” Jun replied, “and it’s no good raking the whole thing up again. Begones is bygones⁠—that’s my motto. But if any man wants to have a grudge against me, well, let him. It’s a free country. That’s all I’ve got to say. Besides, the poor old cuss isn’t all there, perhaps.” + 

“Don’t you fret,” Michael had said, “he’s all right. He’s got as much there as you or me, or any of us for that matter.” + 

“Oh well, you know, Michael,” Jun declared. He was not going to quarrel with Michael Brady. “What you say goes, anyhow!” + 

That was how Jun established himself anywhere. He had an easy, plausible, good-natured way. All the men laughed and drank with him and gave him grudging admiration, notwithstanding the threads and shreds of resentments and distrusts which old stories of his dealings, even with mates, had put in their minds. None of those stories had been proved against him, his friends said, Charley Heathfield among them. That was a fact. But there were too many of them to be good for any man’s soul, Ridge men, who took Jun with a grain of salt, thought⁠—Michael Brady, George Woods, Archie Cross, and Watty Frost among them; but Charley Heathfield, Michael’s mate, had struck up a friendship with Jun since his return to the Ridge. + 

George Woods and the Crosses said it was a case of birds of a feather, but they did not say that to Michael. They knew Michael had the sort of affection for Charley that a man has for a dog he has saved from drowning. + 

Charley Heathfield had been down on his luck when he went to the Ridge, his wife and a small boy with him; and the rush which he had expected to bring him a couple of hundred pounds’ worth of opal at least, if it did not make his fortune, had left him worse off than it found him⁠—a piece of debris in its wake. He and Rouminof had put down a shaft together, and as neither of them, after the first few weeks, did any more work than they could help, and were drunk or quarrelling half of their time, nothing came of their efforts. + 

Charley, when his wife died, was ill himself, and living in a hut a few yards from Michael’s. She had been a waitress in a city restaurant, and he had married her, he said, because she could carry ten dishes of hot soup on one arm and four trays on the other. A tall, stolid, pale-faced woman, she had hated the back-country and her husband’s sense of humour, and had fretted herself to death rather than endure them. Charley had no particular opinion of himself or of her. He called his youngster Potch⁠—“a little bit of Potch,” he said, because the kid would never be anything better than poor opal at the best of times. + 

Michael had nursed Charley while he was ill during that winter, and had taken him in hand when he was well enough to get about again. Charley was supposed to have weak lungs; but better food, steady habits, and the fine, dry air of a mild summer set him up wonderfully. Snowshoes had worked with Michael for a long time; he said that he was getting too old for the everyday toil of the mine, though, when Michael talked of taking on Charley to work with them. It would suit him all right if Michael found another mate. Michael and Charley Heathfield had worked together ever since, and Snowshoes had made his living as far as anybody knew by noodling on the dumps. + 

But Charley and Michael had not come on a glimmer of opal worth speaking of for nearly twelve months. They were hanging on to their claim, hoping each day they would strike something good. There is a superstition among the miners that luck often changes when it seems at its worst. Both Charley and Michael had storekeeper’s accounts as long as their arms, and the men knew if their luck did not change soon, one or the other of them would have to go over to Warria, or to one of the other stations, and earn enough money there to keep the other going on the claim. + 

They had no doubt it would be Michael who would have to go. Charley was not fond of work, and would be able to loaf away his time very pleasantly on the mine, making only a pretence of doing anything, until Michael returned. They wondered why Michael did not go and get a move into his affairs at once. Paul and Sophie might have something to do with his putting off going, they told each other; Michael was anxious how Paul and his luck would fare when it was a question of squaring up with Jun, and as to how the squaring up, when it came, would affect Sophie. + 

Some of them had been concerning themselves on Paul’s account also. They did not like a good deal they had seen of the way Jun was using Paul, and they had resolved to see he got fair play when it was time for a settlement of his and Jun’s account. George Woods, Watty Frost, and Bill Grant went along to talk the matter over with Michael one evening, and found him fixing a shed at the back of the hut which he and Potch had put up for Sophie and her father, a few yards from Charley Heathfield’s, and in line with Michael’s own hut at the old Flash-in-the-Pan rush. + 

“Paul says he’s going away if he gets a good thing out of his and Jun’s find,” George Woods said. + 

“It’ll be a good thing⁠—if he gets a fair deal,” Michael replied. + 

“He’ll get that⁠—if we can fix it,” Watty Frost said. + 

“Yes,” Michael agreed. + 

“Can’t think why you’re taking so much trouble with this place if Paul and Sophie are going away soon, Michael,” George Woods remarked at the end of their talk. + 

“They’re not gone yet,” Michael said, and went on fastening a sapling across the brushwood he had laid over the roof of the shed. + 

The men laughed. They knew Paul well enough to realise that there was no betting on what he would or would not do. They understood Michael did not approve of his plans for Sophie. Nobody did. But what was to be done? If Paul had the money and got the notion into his head that it would be a good thing to go away, Sophie and he would probably go away. But the money would not last, people thought; then Sophie and her father would come back to the Ridge again, or Michael would go to look for them. Being set adrift on the world with no one to look after her would be hard on Sophie, it was agreed, but nobody saw how Rouminof was to be prevented from taking her away if he wanted to. + 

III + 

The unwritten law of the Ridge was that mates pooled all the opal they found and shared equally, so that all Jun held was Rouminof’s, and all that he held was Jun’s. Ordinarily one man kept the lot, and as Jun was the better dealer and master spirit, it was natural enough he should hold the stones, or, at any rate, the best of them. But Rouminof was like a child with opal. He wanted some of the stones to handle, polish up a bit, and show round. Jun humoured him a good deal. He gave Paul a packet of the stuff they had won to carry round himself. He was better tempered and more easygoing with Rouminof, the men admitted, than most of them would have been; but they could not believe Jun was going to deal squarely by him. + 

Jun and his mate seemed on the best of terms. Paul followed him about like a dog, referring to him, quoting him, and taking his word for everything. And Jun was openly genial with Paul, and talked of the times they were going to have when they went down to Sydney together to sell their opal. + 

Paul was never tired of showing his stones, and almost every night at Newton’s he spread them out on a table, looked them over, and held them up to admiration. It was good stuff, but the men who had seen Jun’s package knew that he had kept the best stones. + 

For a couple of weeks after they had come on their nest of knobbies, Jun and Paul had gouged and shovelled dirt enthusiastically; but the wisp fires, mysteriously and suddenly as they had come, had died out of the stone they moved. Paul searched frantically. He and Jun worked like bullocks; but the luck which had flashed on them was withdrawn. Although they broke new tunnels, went through tons of opal dirt with their hands, and tracked every trace of black potch through a reef of cement stone in the mine, not a spark of blue or green light had they seen for over a week. That was the way of black opal, everybody knew, and knew, too, that the men who had been on a good patch of fired stone would not work on a claim, shovelling dirt, long after it disappeared. They would be off down to Sydney, if no buyer was due to visit the fields, eager to make the most of the good time their luck and the opal would bring them. “Opal only brings you bad luck when you don’t get enough of it,” Ridge folk say. + 

George and Watty had a notion Jun would not stick to the claim much longer, when they arranged the night at Newton’s to settle his and Paul’s account with each other. Michael, the Crosses, Cash Wilson, Pony-Fence Inglewood, Bill Grant, Bully Bryant, old Bill Olsen, and most of the staunch Ridge men were in the bar, Charley Heathfield drinking with Jun, when George Woods strolled over to the table where Rouminof was showing Sam Nancarrow his stones. Sam was blacksmith, undertaker, and electoral registrar in Fallen Star, and occasionally did odd butchering jobs when there was no butcher in the township. He had the reputation, too, of being one of the best judges of black opal on the fields. + 

Paul was holding up a good-looking knobby so that red, green, and gold lights glittered through its shining potch as he moved it. + 

“That’s a nice bit of stone you’ve got, Rummy!” George exclaimed. + 

Paul agreed. “But you should see her by candle light, George!” he said eagerly. + 

He held up the stone again so that it caught the light of a lamp hanging over the bar where Peter Newton was standing. The eyes of two or three of the men followed the stone as Paul moved it, and its internal fires broke in showers of sparks. + 

“Look, look!” Paul cried, “now she’s showin’!” + 

“How much have you got on her?” Sam Nancarrow asked. + 

“Jun thinks she’ll bring £50 or £60 at least.” + 

Sam’s and George Woods’ eyes met: £50 was a liberal estimate of the stone’s value. If Paul got £10 or £15 for it he would be doing well, they knew. + 

“They’re nice stones, aren’t they?” Paul demanded, sorting over the opals he had spread out on the table. He held up a piece of green potch with a sun-flash through it. + 

“My oath!” George Woods exclaimed. + 

“But where’s the big beaut?” Archie Cross asked, looking over the stones with George. + 

“Oh, Jun’s got her,” Paul replied. “Jun!” he called, “the boys want to see the big stone.” + 

“Right!” Jun swung across to the table. Several of the men by the bar followed him. “She’s all right,” he said. + 

He sat down, pulled a shabby leather wallet from his pocket, opened it, and took out a roll of dirty flannel; he undid the flannel carefully, and spread the stones on the table. There were several pieces of opal in the packet. The men, who had seen them before separately, uttered soft oaths of admiration and surprise when they saw all the opals together. Two knobbies were as big as almonds, and looked like black almonds, fossilised, with red fire glinting through their green and gold; a large flat stone had stars of red, green, amethyst, blue and gold shifting over and melting into each other; and several smaller stones, all good stuff, showed smouldering fire in depths of green and blue and gold-lit darkness. + 

Jun held the biggest of the opals at arm’s length from the light of the hanging lamp. The men followed his movement, the light washing their faces as it did the stone. + 

“There she goes!” Paul breathed. + 

“What have you got on her?” + 

“A hundred pounds, or thereabouts.” + 

“You’ll get it easy!” + 

Jun put the stone down. He took up another, a smaller piece of opal, of even finer quality. The stars were strewn over and over each other in its limpid black pool. + 

“Nice pattern,” he said. + 

“Yes,” Watty Frost murmured. + 

“She’s not as big as the other⁠ ⁠… but better pattern,” Archie Cross said. + 

“Reckon you’ll get £100 for her too, Jun?” + 

“Yup!” Jun put down the stone. + 

Then he held up each stone in turn, and the men gave it the same level, appraising glance. There was no envy in their admiration. In every man’s eyes was the same worshipful appreciation of black opal. + 

Jun was drunk with his luck. His luck, as much as Newton’s beer, was in his head this night. He had shown his stones before, but never like this, the strength of his luck. + 

“How much do you think there is in your packet, Jun?” Archie Cross asked. + 

Jun stretched his legs under the table. + 

“A thou’ if there’s a penny.” + 

Archie whistled. + 

“And how much do you reckon there is in Rum-Enough’s?” George Woods put the question. + 

“Four or five hundred,” Jun said; “but we’re evens, of course.” + 

He leaned across the table and winked at George. + 

“Oh, I say,” Archie protested, “what’s the game?” + 

They knew Jun wanted them to believe he was joking, humouring Paul. But that was not what they had arranged this party for. + 

“Why not let Rum-Enough mind a few of the good stones, Jun?” + 

“What?” + 

Jun started and stared about him. It was so unusual for one man to suggest to another what he ought to do, or that there was anything like bad faith in his dealings with his mates, that his blood rose. + 

“Why not let Rum-Enough mind a few of the good stones?” George repeated, mildly eyeing him over the bowl of his pipe. + 

“Yes,” Watty butted in, “Rummy ought to hold a few of the good stones, Jun. Y’ see, you might be run into by rats⁠ ⁠… or get knocked out⁠—and have them shook off you, like Oily did down in Sydney⁠—and it’d be hard on Rummy, that⁠—” + 

“When I want your advice about how me and my mate’s going to work things, I’ll ask you,” Jun snarled. + 

“We don’t mind giving it before we’re asked, Jun,” Watty explained amiably. + 

Archie Cross leaned across the table. “How about giving Paul a couple of those bits of decent pattern⁠—if you stick to the big stone?” he said. + 

“What’s the game?” Jun demanded, sitting up angrily. His hand went over his stones. + 

“Wait on, Jun!” Michael said. “We’re not thieves here. You don’t have to grab y’r stones.” + 

Jun looked about him. He saw that men of the Ridge, in the bar, were all standing round the table. Only Peter Newton was left beside the bar, although Charley Heathfield, on the outer edge of the crowd, regarded him with a smile of faint sympathy and cynicism. Paul leaned over the table before him, and looked from Jun to the men who had fallen in round the table, a dazed expression broadening on his face. + 

“What the hell’s the matter?” Jun cried, starting to his feet. “What are you chaps after? Can’t I manage me own affairs and me mate’s?” + 

The crowd moved a little, closer to him. There was no chance of making a break for it. + 

George Woods laughed. + 

“Course you can’t, Jun!” he said. “Not on the Ridge, you can’t manage your affairs and your mate’s⁠ ⁠… your way⁠ ⁠… Not without a little helpful advice from the rest of us.⁠ ⁠… Sit down!” + 

Jun glanced about him again; then, realising the intention on every face, and something of the purpose at the back of it, he sat down again. + 

“Well, I’m jiggered!” he exclaimed. “I see⁠—you believe old Olsen’s story. That’s about the strength of it. Never thought⁠ ⁠… a kid, or a chicken, ’d believe that bloody yarn. Well, what’s the advice⁠ ⁠… boys? Let’s have it, and be done with it!” + 

“We’ll let bygones be bygones, Jun. We won’t say anything about⁠ ⁠… why,” George remarked. “But the boys and I was just thinking it might be as well if you and Rum-Enough sort of shared up the goods now, and then⁠ ⁠… if he doesn’t want to go to Sydney same time as you, Jun, he can deal his goods here, or when he does go.” + 

No one knew better than Jun the insult which all this seemingly good-natured talking covered. He knew that neither he, nor any other man, would have dared to suggest that Watty, or George, or Michael, were not to be trusted to deal for their mates, to the death even. But then he knew, too, they were to be trusted; that there was not money enough in the world to buy their loyalty to each other and to their mates, and that he could measure their suspicion of his good faith by his knowledge of himself. To play their game as they would have played it was the only thing for him to do, he recognised. + 

“Right!” he said, “I’m more than willing. In fact, I wouldn’t have the thing on me mind⁠—seein’ the way you chaps ’ve taken it. But ’d like to know which one of you wouldn’t ’ve done what I’ve done if Rum-Enough was your mate?” + 

Every man was uneasily conscious that Jun was right. Any one of them, if he had Paul for a mate, would have taken charge of the most valuable stones, in Paul’s interest as well as his own. At the same time, every man felt pretty sure the thing was a horse of another colour where Jun was concerned. + 

“Which one of us,” George Woods inquired, “if a mate’d been set on by a spieler in Sydney, would’ve let him stump his way to Brinarra and foot it out here⁠ ⁠… like you let old Olsen?” + 

Jun’s expression changed; his features blenched, then a flame of blood rushed over his face. + 

“It’s a lie,” he yelled. “He cleared out⁠—I never saw him afterwards!” + 

“Oh well,” George said, “we’ll let bygones be bygones, Jun. Let’s have a look at that flat stone.” + 

Jun handed him the stone. + 

George held it to the light. + 

“Nice bit of opal,” he said, letting the light play over it a moment, then passed it on to Michael and Watty. + 

“You keep the big stone, and Paul’ll have this,” Archie Cross said. + 

He put the stone beside Paul’s little heap of gems. + 

Jun sat back in his chair: his eyes smouldering as the men went over his opals, appraising and allotting each one, putting some before Rouminof, and some back before him. They dealt as judicially with the stones as though they were a jury of experts, on the case⁠—as they really were. When their decisions were made, Jun had still rather the better of the stones, although the division had been as nearly fair as possible. + 

Paul was too dazed and amazed to speak. He glanced dubiously from his stones to Jun, who rolled his opals back in the strip of dirty flannel, folded it into his leather wallet, and dropped that into his coat pocket. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. + 

Big and swarthy, with eyes which took a deeper colour from the new blue shirt he had on, Jun stood an inch or so above the other men. + 

“Well,” he said, “you boys have put it across me tonight. You’ve made a mistake⁠ ⁠… but I’m not one to bear malice. You done right if you thought I wasn’t going to deal square by Rum-Enough⁠ ⁠… but I’ll lay you any money you like I’d ’ve made more money for him by selling his stones than he’ll make himself⁠—Still, that’s your business⁠ ⁠… if you want it that way. But as far as I’m concerned, I’m just where I was⁠—in luck. And you chaps owe me something.⁠ ⁠… Come and have a drink.” + 

Most of the men, who believed Jun was behaving with better grace than they had expected him to, moved off to have a drink with him. They were less sure than they had been earlier in the evening that they had done Rouminof a good turn by giving him possession of his share of the opals. It was just on the cards, they realised as Jun said, that instead of doing Rouminof a good turn, if Jun had been going to deal squarely by him, they had done him a rather bad one. Paul was pretty certain to make a mess of trading his own stones, and to get about half their value from an opal-buyer if he insisted on taking them down to Sydney to sell himself. + 

“What’ll you do now your fortune’s fixed up, Rummy?” George Woods asked, jokingly, when he and two or three men were left with Paul by the table. + 

“I’ll get out of this,” Paul said. “We’ll go down to Sydney⁠—me and Sophie⁠—and we’ll say goodbye to the Ridge for good.” + 

The men laughed. It was the old song of an outsider who cared nothing for the life of the Ridge, when he got a couple of hundred pounds’ worth of opal. He thought he was made for life and would never come back to the Ridge; but he always did when his money was spent. Only Michael, standing a little behind George Woods, did not smile. + 

“But you can’t live forever on three or four hundred quid,” Watty Frost said. + 

“No,” Paul replied eagerly, “but I can always make a bit playing at dances, and Sophie’s going to be a singer. You wait till people hear her sing.⁠ ⁠… Her mother was a singer. She had a beautiful voice. When it went we came here.⁠ ⁠… But Sophie can sing as well as her mother. And she’s young. She ought to make a name for herself.” + 

He wrapped the stones before him in a piece of wadding, touching them reverently, and folded them into the tin cigarette box Michael had given him to carry about the first stones Jun had let him have. He was still mystified over the business of the evening, and why the boys had made Jun give him the other stones. He had been quite satisfied for Jun to hold most of the stones, and the best ones, as any man on the Ridge would be for his mate to take care of their common property. There was a newspaper lying on the table. He took it, wrapped it carefully about his precious box, tied a piece of strong string round it, and let the box down carefully into the big, loose pocket of his shabby coat. + 

IV + 

Watty and George were well satisfied with their night’s work when they went out of the bar into the street. Michael was with them. He said nothing, but they took it for granted he was as pleased as they were at what had been done and the way in which it had been done. Michael was always chary of words, and all night they had noticed that what they called his “considering cap” had been well drawn over his brows. He stood smoking beside them and listening abstractedly to what they were saying. + 

“Well, that’s fixed him,” Watty remarked, glancing back into the room they had just left. + 

Jun was leaning over the bar talking to Newton, the light from the lamp above, on his red, handsome face, and cutting the bulk of his head and shoulders from the gloom of the room and the rest of the men about him. Peter Newton was serving drinks, and Jun laughing and joking boisterously as he handed them on to the men. + 

“He’s a clever devil!” George exclaimed. + 

“Yes,” Michael said. + 

“Shouldn’t wonder if he didn’t clear out by the coach tomorrow,” George said. + 

“Nor me,” Watty grunted. + 

“Well, he won’t be taking Paul with him.” + 

“Not tomorrow.” + 

“No.” + 

“But Rummy’s going down to town soon as he can get, he says.” + 

“Yes.” + 

“Say, Michael, why don’t you try scarin’ him about losing his stones like Bill Olsen did?” + 

“I have.” + 

“What does he say?” + 

“Says,” Michael smiled, “the sharks won’t get any of his money or opal.” + 

Watty snuffed contemptuously by way of exclamation. + 

“Well, I’ll be getting along,” Michael added, and walked away in the direction of his hut. + 

George and Watty watched his spare figure sway down the road between the rows of huts which formed the Fallen Star township. It was a misty moonlight night, and the huts stood dark against the sheening screen of sky, with here and there a glow of light through open doorways, or small, square window panes. + 

“It’s on Michael’s mind, Rum-Enough’s going and taking Sophie with him,” George, said. + 

“I don’t wonder,” Watty replied. “He’ll come a cropper, sure as eggs.⁠ ⁠… And what’s to become of her? Michael ’d go to town with them if he had a bean⁠—but he hasn’t. He’s stony, I know.” + 

Even to his mate he did not say why he knew, and George did not ask, understanding Watty’s silence. It was not very long since George himself had given Michael a couple of pounds; but he had a very good idea Michael had little to do with the use of that money. He guessed that he would have less to do with whatever he got from Watty. + 

“Charley’s going over to Warria tomorrow, isn’t he?” he asked. + 

Watty grunted. “About time he did something. Michael’s been grafting for him for a couple of years⁠ ⁠… and he’d have gone to the station himself⁠—only he didn’t want to go away till he knew what Paul was going to do. Been trying pretty hard to persuade him to leave Sophie⁠—till he’s fixed up down town⁠—but you wouldn’t believe how obstinate the idiot is. Thinks he can make a singer of her in no time⁠ ⁠… then she’ll keep her old dad till kingdom come.” + 

Michael’s figure was lost to sight between the trees which encroached on the track beyond the town. Jun was singing in the hotel. His great rollicking voice came to George and Watty with shouts of laughter. George, looking back through the open door, saw Rouminof had joined the crowd round the bar. + 

He was drinking as George’s glance fell on him. + 

“Think he’s all right?” Watty asked. + 

George did not reply. + 

“You don’t suppose Jun ’d try to take the stones off of him, do you, George?” Watty inquired again. “You don’t think⁠—?” + 

“I don’t suppose he’d dare, seein’ we’ve⁠ ⁠… let him know how we feel.” + 

George spoke slowly, as if he were not quite sure of what he was saying. + 

“He knows his hide’d suffer if he tried.” + 

“That’s right.” + 

Archie Cross came from the bar and joined them. + 

“He’s trying to make up to the boys⁠—he likes people to think he’s Christmas, Jun,” he said, “and he just wants ’em to forget that anything’s been said⁠—detrimental to his character like.” + 

George was inclined to agree with Archie. They went to the form against the wall of the hotel and sat there smoking for a while; then all three got up to go home. + 

“You don’t think we ought to see Rummy home?” Watty inquired hesitatingly. + 

He was ashamed to suggest that Rouminof, drunk, and with four or five hundred pounds’ worth of opal in his pockets, was not as safe as if his pockets were empty. But Jun had brought a curious unrest into the community. Watty, or Archie, or George, themselves would have walked about with the same stuff in their pockets without ever thinking anybody might try to put a finger on it. + 

None of the three looked at each other as they thought over the proposition. Then Archie spoke: + 

“I told Ted,” he murmured apologetically, “to keep an eye on Rummy, as he’s coming home. If there’s rats about, you never can tell what may happen. We ain’t discovered yet who put it over on Rummy and Jun on the day of Mrs. Rouminof’s funeral. So I just worded Ted to keep an eye on the old fool. He comes our track most of the way⁠ ⁠… And if he’s tight, he might start sheddin’ his stones out along the road⁠—you never can tell.” + 

George Woods laughed. The big, genial soul of the man looked out of his eyes. + 

“That’s true,” he said heartily. + 

Archie and he smiled into each other’s eyes. They understood very well what lay behind Archie’s words; They could not bring themselves to admit there was any danger to the sacred principle of Ridge life, that a mate stands by a mate, in letting Rouminof wander home by himself. He might be in danger if there were rats about; they would admit that. But rats, the men who sneaked into other men’s mines when they were on good stuff, and took out their opal during the night, were never Ridge men. They were newcomers, outsiders, strangers on the rushes, who had not learnt or assimilated Ridge ideas. + 

After a few minutes George turned away. “Well, good night, Archie,” he said. + 

Watty moved after him. + 

“ ’Night!” Archie replied. + 

George and Watty went along the road together, and Archie walked off in the direction Michael had taken. + 

But Michael had not gone home. When the trees screened him from sight, he had struck out across the Ridge, then, turning back on his tracks behind the town, had made towards the Warria road. He walked, thinking hard, without noticing where he was going, his mind full of Paul, of Sophie, and of his promise. + 

Now that Paul had his opal, it was clear he would be able to do as he wished⁠—leave the Ridge and take Sophie with him. For the time being at least he was out of Jun Johnson’s hands⁠—but Michael was sure he would not stay out of them if he went to Sydney. How to prevent his going⁠—how, rather, to prevent Sophie going with him⁠—that was Michael’s problem. He did not know what he was going to do. + 

He had asked Sophie not to go with her father. He had told her what her mother had said, and tried to explain to her why her mother had not wanted her to go away from the Ridge, or to become a public singer. But Sophie was as excited about her future as her father was. It was natural she should be, Michael assured himself. She was young, and had heard wonderful stories of Sydney and the world beyond the Ridge. Sydney was like the town in a fairy tale to her. + 

It was not to be expected, Michael confessed to himself, that Sophie would choose to stay on Fallen Star Ridge. If she could only be prevailed upon to put off her departure until she was older and better able to take care of herself, he would be satisfied. If the worst came to the worst, and she went to Sydney with her father soon, Michael had decided to go with them. Peter Newton would give him a couple of pounds for his books, he believed, and he would find something to do down in Sydney. His roots were in the Ridge. Michael did not know how he was going to live away from the mines; but anything seemed better than that Sophie should be committed to what her mother had called “the treacherous whirlpool” of life in a great city, with no one but her father to look after her. + 

And her mother had said: + 

“Don’t let him take her away, Michael.” + 

Michael believed that Marya Rouminof intended Sophie to choose for herself whether she would stay on the Ridge or not, when she was old enough. But now she was little more than a child, sixteen, nearly seventeen, young for her years in some ways and old in others. Michael knew her mother had wanted Sophie to grow up on the Ridge and to realise that all the potentialities of real and deep happiness were there. + 

“They say there’s got to be a scapegoat in every family, Michael,” she had said once. “Someone has to pay for the happiness of the others. If all that led to my coming here will mean happiness for Sophie, it will not have been in vain.” + 

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Michael had told her. + 

“Looking for justice⁠—poetic justice, isn’t it, they call it?⁠—in the working out of things. There isn’t any of this poetic justice except by accident. The natural laws just go rolling on⁠—laying us out under them. All we can do is set our lives as far as possible in accordance with them and stand by the consequences as well as we know how.” + 

“Of course, you’re right,” she had sighed, “but⁠—” + 

It was for that “but” Michael was fighting now. He knew what lay beyond it⁠—a yearning for her child to fare a little better in the battle of life than she had. Striding almost unconsciously over the loose, shingly ground, Michael was not aware what direction his steps were taking until he saw glimmering white shapes above the grass and herbage of the plains, and realised that he had walked to the gates of the cemetery. + 

With an uncomfortable sense of broken faith, he turned away from the gate, unable to go in and sit under the tree there, to smoke and think, as he sometimes did. He had used every argument with Paul to prevent his taking Sophie away, he knew; but for the first time since Michael and he had been acquainted with each other, Paul had shown a steady will. He made up his mind he was “going to shake the dust of the Ridge off his feet,” he said. And that was the end of it. Michael almost wished the men had let Jun clear out with his stones. That would have settled the business. But, his instinct of an opal-miner asserting itself, he was unable to wish Paul the loss of his luck, and Jun what he would have to be to deprive Paul of it. He walked on chewing the cud of bitter and troubled reflections. + 

“Don’t let him take her away!” a voice seemed to cry suddenly after him. + 

Michael stopped; he snatched the hat from his head. + 

“No!” he said, “he shan’t take her away!” + 

Startled by the sound of his own voice, the intensity of thinking which had wrung it from him, dazed by the sudden strength of resolution which had come over him, he stood, his face turned to the sky. The stars rained their soft light over him. As he looked up to them, his soul went from him by force of will. How long he stood like that, he did not know; but when his eyes found the earth again he looked about him wonderingly. After a little while he put on his hat and turned away. All the pain and trouble were taken from his thinking; he was strangely soothed and comforted. He went back along the road to the town, and, skirting the trees and the houses on the far side, came again to the track below Newton’s. + 

Lights were still shining in the hotel although it was well after midnight. Michael could hear voices in the clear air. A man was singing one of Jun’s choruses as he went down the road towards the Punti Rush. Michael kept on his way. He was still wondering what he could do to prevent Paul taking Sophie away; but he was no longer worried about it⁠—his brain was calm and clear; his step lighter than it had been for a long time. + 

He heard the voices laughing and calling to each other as he walked on. + 

“Old Ted!” he commented to himself, recognising Ted Cross’s voice. “He’s blithered!” + 

When he came to a fork in the tracks where one went off in the direction of his, Charley’s, and Rouminof’s huts, and the other towards the Crosses’, Michael saw Ted Cross lumbering along in the direction of his own hut. + 

“Must ’ve been saying good night to Charley and Paul,” he thought. A little farther along the path he saw Charley and Paul, unsteady shadows ahead of him in the moonlight, and Charley had his arm under Paul’s, helping him home. + 

“Good old Charley!” Michael thought, quickly appreciative of the man he loved. + 

He could hear them talking, Rouminof’s voice thick and expostulatory, Charley’s even and clear. + 

“Charley’s all right. He’s not showin’, anyhow,” Michael told himself. He wondered at that. Charley was not often more sober than his company, and he had been drinking a good deal, earlier in the evening. + 

Michael was a few yards behind them and was just going to quicken his steps and hail Charley, when he saw the flash of white in Charley’s hand⁠—something small, rather longer than square, a cigarette box wrapped in newspaper, it might have been⁠—and Michael saw Charley drop it into the pocket of his coat. + 

Paul wandered on, talking stupidly, drowsily. He wanted to go to sleep there on the roadside; but Charley led him on. + 

“You’ll be better at home and in bed,” he said. “You’re nearly there now.” + 

Instinctively, with that flash of white, Michael had drawn into the shadow of the trees which fringed the track. Charley, glancing back along it, had not seen him. Several moments passed before Michael moved. He knew what had happened, but the revelation was such a shock that his brain would not react to it. Charley, his mate, Charley Heathfield had stolen Paul’s opals. The thing no man on the Ridge had attempted, notwithstanding its easiness, Charley had done. Although he had seen, Michael could scarcely believe that what he had seen, had happened. + 

The two men before him staggered and swayed together. Their huts stood only a few yards from each other, a little farther along the track. + 

Charley took Paul to the door of his hut, opened it and pushed him in. He stood beside the door, listening and looking down the track for a second longer. Michael imagined he would want to know whether Paul would discover his loss or just pitch forward and sleep where he lay. Then Charley went on to his own hut and disappeared. + 

When the light glowed in his window, Michael went on up the track, keeping well to the cover of the trees. Opposite the hut he took off his boots. He put his feet down carefully, pressing the loose pebbles beneath him, as he crossed the road. It seemed almost impossible to move on that shingly ground without making a sound, and yet when he stood beside the bark wall of Charley’s room and could see through the smeared pane of its small window, Charley had not heard a pebble slip. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, the stub of a lighted candle in a saucer on the bed beside him, and the box containing the opals lying near it as if he were just going to cut the string and have a look at them. The wall creaked as Michael leaned against it. + 

“Who’s there?” Charley cried sharply. + 

He threw a blanket over the box on the bed and started to the door. + 

Michael moved round the corner of the house. He heard Potch call sleepily: + 

“That you?” + 

Charley growled; + 

“Oh, go to sleep, can’t you? Aren’t you asleep yet?” + 

Potch murmured, and there was silence again. + 

Michael heard Charley go to the door, look out along the road, and turn back into the hut. Then Michael moved along the wall to the window. + 

Charley was taking down some clothes hanging from nails along the inner wall. He changed from the clothes he had on into them, picked up his hat, lying where he had thrown it on the floor beside the bed when he came in, rolled it up, straightened the brim and dinged the crown to his liking. Then he picked up the packet of opal, put it in his coat pocket, and went into the other room. Michael followed to the window which gave on it. He saw Charley glance at the sofa as though he were contemplating a stretch, but, thinking better of it, he settled into an easy, bag-bottomed old chair by the table, pulled a newspaper to him, and began to read by the guttering light of his candle. + 

Michael guessed why Charley had dressed, and why he had chosen to sit and read rather than go to sleep. It was nearly morning, the first chill of dawn in the air. The coach left at seven o’clock, and Charley meant to catch the coach. He had no intention of going to Warria. Michael began to get a bird’s-eye view of the situation. He wondered whether Charley had ever intended going to Warria. He realised Charley would go off with the five pound note he had made him, Michael, get from Watty Frost, as well as with Paul’s opals. He began, to see clearly what that would mean, too⁠—Charley’s getting away with Paul’s opals. Paul would not be able to take Sophie away.⁠ ⁠… + 

In the branches of a shrub nearby, a whitetail was crying plaintively: “Sweet pretty creature! Sweet pretty creature!” Michael remembered how it had cried like that on the day of Mrs. Rouminof’s funeral. + 

Whether to go into the hut, tell Charley he knew what he had done, and demand the return of the opals, or let him get away with them, Michael had not decided, when Charley’s hand went to his pocket, and, as it closed over the package of opals, a smile of infantile satisfaction flitted across his face. That smile, criminal in its treachery, enraged Michael more than the deed itself. The candle Charley had been reading by guttered out. He stumbled about the room looking for another. After a while, as if he could not find one, he went back to his chair and settled into it. The room fell into darkness, lit only by the dim pane of the window by which Michael was standing. + 

Michael’s mind seethed with resentment and anger. The thing he had prayed for, that his brain had ached over, had been arranged. Rouminof would not be able to take Sophie away. But Michael was too good a Ridge man not to detest Charley’s breach of the good faith of the Ridge. Charley had been accepted by men of the Ridge as one of themselves⁠—at least, Michael believed he had. + 

George, Watty, the Crosses, and most of the other men would have confessed to reservations where Charley Heathfield was concerned. But as long as he had lived as a mate among them, they had been mates to him. Michael did not want Rouminof to have his stones if having them meant taking Sophie away, but he did not want him to lose them. He could not allow Charley to get away with them, with that smile of infantile satisfaction. If the men knew what he had done there would be little of that smile left on his face when they had finished with him. Their methods of dealing with rats were short and severe. And although he deserved all he got from them, Michael was not able to decide to hand Charley over to the justice of the men of the Ridge. + 

As he hesitated, wondering what to do, the sound of heavy, regular breathing came to him, and, looking through the window, he saw that Charley had done the last thing he intended to do⁠—he had fallen asleep in his chair. + 

In a vivid, circling flash, Michael’s inspiration came to him. He went across to his hut, lighted a candle when he got indoors, and took the black pannikin he kept odd pieces of opal in, from the top of a bookshelf. There was nothing of any great value in the pannikin⁠—a few pieces of coloured potch which would have made a packet for an opal-buyer when he came along, and a rather good piece of stone in the rough he had kept as a mascot for a number of years⁠—that was all. Michael turned them over. He went to the corner shelf and returned to the table with a cigarette box the same size as the one Rouminof had kept his opals in. Michael took a piece of soiled wadding from a drawer in the table, rolled the stones in it, and fitted them into the box. He wrapped the tin in a piece of newspaper and tied it with string. Then he blew out his candle and went out of doors again. + 

He made his way carefully over the shingles to Charley’s hut. When he reached it, he leaned against the wall, listening to hear whether Charley was still asleep. The sound of heavy breathing came slowly and regularly. Michael went to the back of the hut. There was no door to it. He went in, and slowly approached the chair in which Charley was sleeping. + 

He could never come to any clear understanding with himself as to how he had done what he did. He knew only a sick fear possessed him that Charley would wake and find him, Michael, barefooted, like a thief in his house. But he was not a thief, he assured himself. It was not thieving to take from a thief. + 

Charley stirred uneasily. His arm went out; in the dim light Michael saw it go over the pocket which held the packet of opal; his hand clutch at it unconsciously. Sweating with fear and the nervous tension he was under, Michael remained standing in the darkness. He waited, wondering whether he would throw off Charley’s hand and snatch the opal, or whether he would stand till morning, hesitating, and wondering what to do, and Charley would wake at last and find him there. He had decided to wrench Charley’s arm from the pocket, when Charley himself flung it out with a sudden restless movement. + 

In an instant, almost mechanically, Michael’s hand went to the pocket. He lifted the packet there and put his own in its place. + 

The blood was booming in his ears when he turned to the door. A sense of triumph unnerved him more than the execution of his inspiration. Charley muttered and called out in his sleep as Michael passed through the doorway. + 

Then the stars were over him. Michael drew a deep breath of the night air and crossed to his own hut, the package of opal under his coat. Just as he was entering he drew back, vaguely alarmed. A movement light as thistledown seemed to have caught his ear. He thought he had detected a faint shifting of the shingle nearby. He glanced about with quick apprehension, went back to Charley’s hut, listened, and looked around; but Charley was still sleeping. Michael walked back to his own hut. There was no sight or sound of a living thing in the wan, misty moonlight of the dawn, except the whitetail which was still crying from a wilga near Charley’s hut. + 

The package under his coat felt very heavy and alive when he returned to his own hut. Michael was disturbed by that faint sound he had heard, or thought he had heard. He persuaded himself he had imagined it, that in the overwrought state of his sensibilities the sound of his own breath, and his step on the stones, had surprised and alarmed him. The tin of opals burned against his body, seeming to scar the skin where it pressed. Michael sickened at the thought of how what he had done might look to anyone who had seen him. But he put the thought from him. It was absurd. He had looked; there was no one about⁠—nothing. He was allowing his mind to play tricks with him. The success of what he had done made him seem like a thief. But he was not a thief. The stones were Rouminof’s. He had taken them from Charley for him, and he would not even look at them. He would keep them for Paul. + 

If Charley got away without discovering the change of the packets, as he probably would, in the early morning and in his excitement to catch the coach, he would be considered the thief. Rouminof would accuse him; Charley would know his own guilt. He would not dare to confess what he had done, even when he found that his package of opal had been changed. He would not know when it had been changed. He would not know whether it had been changed, perhaps, before he took it from Rouminof. + 

Charley might recognise the stones in that packet he had done up, Michael realised; but he did not think so. Charley was not much of a judge of opal. Michael did not think he would remember the few scraps of sun-flash they had come on together, and Charley had never seen the mascot he had put into the packet, with a remnant of feeling for the memory of their working days together. + 

Michael did not light the candle when he went into his hut again. He threw himself down on the bed in his clothes; he knew that he would not sleep as he lay there. His brain burned and whirled, turning over the happenings of the night and their consequences, likely and unlikely. The package of opal lay heavy in his pocket. He took it out and dropped it into a box of books at the end of the room. + 

He did not like what he had done, and yet he was glad he had done it. When he could see more clearly, he was glad, too, that he had grasped this opportunity to control circumstances. A reader and dreamer all his days, he had begun to be doubtful of his own capacity for action. He could think and plan, but he doubted whether he had strength of will to carry out purposes he had dreamed a long time over. He was pleased, in an odd, fierce way, that he had been able to do what he thought should be done. + 

“But I don’t want them.⁠ ⁠… I don’t want the cursed stones,” he argued with himself. “I’ll give them to him⁠—to Paul, as soon as I know what ought to be done about Sophie. She’s not old enough to go yet⁠—to know her own mind⁠—what she wants to do. When she’s older she can decide for herself. That’s what her mother meant. She didn’t mean for always⁠ ⁠… only while she’s a little girl. By and by, when she’s a woman, Sophie can decide for herself. Now, she’s got to stay here⁠ ⁠… that’s what I promised.” + 

“And Charley,” he brooded. “He deserves all that’s coming to him⁠ ⁠… but I couldn’t give him away. The boys would half kill him if they got their hands on to him. When will he find out? In the train, perhaps⁠—or not till he gets to Sydney.⁠ ⁠… He’ll have my fiver, and the stones to go on with⁠—though they won’t bring much. Still, they’ll do to go on with.⁠ ⁠… Paul’ll be a raving lunatic when he knows⁠ ⁠… but he can’t go⁠—he can’t take Sophie away.” + 

His brain surged over and over every phrase: his state of mind since he had seen Charley and Paul on the road together; every argument he had used with himself. He could not get away from the double sense of disquiet and satisfaction. + 

An hour or two later he heard Charley moving about, then rush off down the track, sending the loose stones flying under his feet as he ran to catch the coach. + 

V + 

Watty was winding dirt, standing by the windlass on the top of the dump over his and his mates’ mine, when he saw Paul coming along the track from the New Town. Paul was breaking into a run at every few yards, and calling out. Watty threw the mullock from his hide bucket as it came up, and lowered it again. He wound up another bucket. The creak of the windlass, and the fall of the stone and earth as he threw them over the dump, drowned the sound of Rouminof’s voice. As he came nearer, Watty saw that he was gibbering with rage, and crying like a child. + 

While he was still some distance away, Watty heard him sobbing and calling out. + 

He stopped work to listen as Paul came to the foot of Michael’s dump. Ted Cross, who was winding dirt on the top of Crosses’ mine, stopped to listen too. Old Olsen got up from where he lay noodling on Jun’s and Paul’s claim, and went across to Paul. Snowshoes, stretched across the slope near where Watty was standing, lifted his head, his turning of earth with a little blunt stick arrested for the moment. + 

“They’ve took me stones!⁠ ⁠… Took me stones!” Watty heard Paul cry to Bill Olsen. And as he climbed the slope of Michael’s dump he went on crying: “Took me stones! Took me stones! Charley and Jun! Gone by the coach! Michael!⁠ ⁠… They’ve gone by the coach and took me stones!” + 

Over and over again he said the same thing in an incoherent wail and howl. He went down the shaft of Michael’s mine, and Ted Cross came across from his dump to Watty. + 

“Hear what he says, Watty?” he asked. + 

“Yes,” Watty replied. + 

“It gets y’r wind⁠—” + 

“If it’s true,” Watty ventured slowly. + 

“Seems to me it’s true all right,” Ted said. “Charley took him home last night. I went along with them as far as the turnoff. Paul was a bit on⁠ ⁠… and Archie asked me to keep an eye on him.⁠ ⁠… I was a bit on meself, too⁠ ⁠… but Charley came along with us⁠—so I thought he’d be all right.⁠ ⁠… Charley went off by the coach this morning.⁠ ⁠… Bill Olsen told me.⁠ ⁠… And Michael was reck’ning on him goin’ to Warria today, I know.” + 

“That’s right!” + 

“It’ll be hard on Michael!” + 

Watty’s gesture, upward jerk of his chin, and gusty breath, denoted his agreement on that score. + 

Ted went back to his own claim, and Watty slid down the rope with his next bucket to give his mates the news. It was nearly time to knock off for the midday meal, and before long men from all the claims were standing in groups hearing the story from Rouminof himself, or talking it over together. + 

Michael had come up from his mine soon after Paul had gone down to him. The men had seen him go off down the track to the New Town, his head bent. They thought they knew why. Michael would feel his mate’s dishonour as though it were his own. He would not be able to believe that what Paul said was true. He would want to know from Peter Newton himself if it was a fact that Charley had gone out on the coach with Jun and two girls who had been at the hotel. + 

Women were scarce on the opal fields, and the two girls who had come a week before to help Mrs. Newton with the work of the hotel had been having the time of their lives. Charley, Jun Johnson, and two or three other men, had been shouting drinks for them from the time of their arrival, and Mrs. Newton had made up her mind to send the girls back to town by the next coach. Jun had appropriated the younger of the two, a bright-eyed girl, and the elder, a full-bosomed, florid woman with straw-coloured hair, had, as the boys said, “taken a fancy to Charley.” + 

Paul had already told his story once or twice when Cash Wilson, George, and Watty, went across to where he was standing, with half a dozen of the men about him. They were listening gravely and smoking over Paul’s recital. There had been ratting epidemics on the Ridge; but robbery of a mate by a mate had never occurred before. It struck at the fundamental principle of their life in common. There was no mistaking the grave, rather than indignant view men of the Ridge took of what Charley had done. The Ridge code affirmed simply that “a mate stands by a mate.” The men say: “You can’t go back on a mate.” By those two recognitions they had run their settlement. Far from all the ordinary institutions of law and order, they had lived and worked together without need of them, by appreciation of their relationship to each other as mates and as a fraternity of mates. No one, who had lived under and seemed to accept the principle of mateship, had ever before done as Charley had done. + 

“But Charley Heathfield was never one of us really,” Ted Cross said. “He was always an outsider.” + 

“That’s right, Ted,” George Woods replied. “We only stuck him on Michael’s account.” + 

Paul told George, Watty, and Cash the story he had been going over all the morning⁠—how he had gone home with Charley, how he remembered going along the road with him, and then how he had wakened on the floor of his own hut in the morning. Sophie was there. She was singing. He had thought it was her mother. He had called her⁠ ⁠… but Sophie had come to him. And she had abused him. She had called him “a dirty, fat pig,” and told him to get out of the way because she wanted to sweep the floor. + 

He sobbed uncontrollably. The men sympathised with him. They knew the loss of opal came harder on Rouminof than it would have on the rest of them, because he was so mad about the stuff. They condoned the abandonment of his grief as natural enough in a foreigner, too; but after a while it irked them. + 

“Take a pull at y’rself, Rummy, can’t you?” George Woods said irritably. “What did Michael say?” + 

“Michael?” Paul looked at him, his eyes streaming. + 

George nodded. + 

“He did not say,” Paul replied. “He threw down his pick. He would not work any more⁠ ⁠… and then he went down to Newton’s to ask about Charley.” + 

Two or three of the men exchanged glances. That was the way they had expected Michael to take the news. He would not have believed Paul’s story at first. They did not see Michael again that day. In the evening Peter Newton told them how Michael had come to him, asking if it was true Charley had gone on the coach with Jun Johnson and the girls. Peter told Michael, he said, that Charley had gone on the coach, and that he thought Rouminof’s story looked black against Charley. + 

“Michael didn’t say much,” Peter explained, “but I don’t think he could help seeing what I said was true⁠—however much he didn’t want to.” + 

Everybody knew Michael believed in Charley Heathfield. He had thought the worst that could be said of Charley was that he was a good-natured, rather shiftless fellow. All the men had responded to an odd attractive faculty Charley exercised occasionally. He had played it like a woman for Michael, and Michael had taken him on as a mate and worked with him when no one else would. And now, the men guessed, that Michael, who had done more than any of them to make the life of the Ridge what it was, would feel more deeply and bitterly than any of them that Charley had gone back on him and on what the Ridge stood for. + 

All they imagined Michael was suffering in the grief and bitterness of spirit which come of misplaced faith, he was suffering. But they could not imagine the other considerations which had overshadowed grief and bitterness, the realisation that Sophie’s life had been saved from what looked like early wreckage, and the consciousness that the consequences of what Charley had done, had fallen, not on Charley, but on himself. Michael had lived like a child, with an open heart at the disposal of his mates always; and the sense of Charley’s guilt descending on him, had created a subtle ostracism, a remote alienation from them. + 

He could not go to Newton’s in the evening and talk things over with the men as he ordinarily would have. He wandered over the dumps of deserted rushes at the Old Town, his eyes on the ground or on the distant horizons. He could still only believe he had done the best thing possible under the circumstances. If he had let Charlie go away with the stones, Sophie would have been saved, but Paul would have lost his stones. As it was, Sophie was saved, and Paul had not lost his stones. And Michael could not have given Charley away. Charley had been his mate; they had worked together. The men might suspect, but they could not convict him of being what he was unless they knew what Michael knew. Charley had played on the affection, the simplicity of Michael’s belief in him. He had used them, but Michael had still a lingering tenderness and sympathy for him. It was that which had made him put the one decent piece of opal he possessed into the parcel he had made up for Charley to take instead of Paul’s stones. It was the first piece of good stuff he had found on the Ridge, and he had kept it as a mascot⁠—something of a nest egg. + 

Michael wondered at the fate which had sent him along the track just when Charley had taken Paul’s stones. He was perplexed and impatient of it. There would have been no complication, no conflict and turmoil if only he had gone along the track a little later, or a little earlier. But there was no altering what had happened. He had to bear the responsibility of it. He had to meet the men, encounter the eyes of his mates as he had never done before, with a reservation from them. If he could give the stones to Paul at once, Michael knew he would disembarass himself of any sense of guilt. But he could not do that. He was afraid if Paul got possession of the opals again he would want to go away and take Sophie with him. + 

Michael thought of taking Watty and George into his confidence, but to do so would necessitate explanations⁠—explanations which involved talking of the promise he had made Sophie’s mother and all that lay behind their relationship. He shrank from allowing even the sympathetic eyes of George and Watty to rest on what for him was wrapped in mystery and inexplicable reverence. Besides, they both had wives, and Watty was not permitted to know anything Mrs. Watty did not worm out of him sooner or later. Michael decided that if he could not keep his own confidence he could not expect anyone else to keep it. He must take the responsibility of what he had done, and of maintaining his position in respect to the opals until Sophie was older⁠—old enough to do as she wished with her life. + 

As he walked, gazing ahead, a hut formed itself out of the distance before him, and then the dark shapes of bark huts huddled against the white cliff of dumps at the Three Mile, under a starry sky. A glow came from the interior of one or two of the houses. A chime of laughter, and shredded fragments of talking drifted along in the clear air. Michael felt strangely alone and outcast, hearing them and knowing that he could not respond to their invitation. + 

In any one of those huts a place would be eagerly made for him if he went into it; eyes would lighten with a smile; warm, kindly greetings would go to his heart. But the talk would all be of the stealing of Rouminof’s opal, and of Charley and Jun, Michael knew. The people at the Three Mile would have seen the coach pass. They would be talking about it, about himself, and the girls who had driven away with Charley and Jun. + 

Turning back, Michael walked again across the flat country towards the Ridge. He sat for a while on a log near the tank paddock. A drugging weariness permeated his body and brain, though his brain ticked ceaselessly. Now and again one or other of Rouminof’s opals flashed and scintillated before him in the darkness, or moved off in starry flight before his tired gaze. He was vaguely disturbed by the vision of them. + 

When he rose and went back towards the town, his feet dragged wearily. There was a strange lightness at the back of his head, and he wondered whether he were walking in the fields of heaven, and smiled to think of that. At least one good thing would come of it all, he told himself over and over again⁠—Paul could not take Sophie away. + 

The houses and stores of the New Town were all in darkness when he passed along the main street. Newton’s was closed. There were no lights in Rouminof’s or Charley’s huts as he went to his own door. Then a low cry caught his ear. He listened, and went to the back door of Charley’s hut. The cry rose again with shuddering gasps for breath. Michael stood in the doorway, listening. The sound came from the window. He went towards it, and found Potch lying there on the bunk with his face to the wall. + 

He had not heard Michael enter, and lay moaning brokenly. Michael had not thought of Potch since the people at Newton’s told him that a few minutes, after the coach had gone Potch had come down to the hotel to cut wood and do odd jobs in the stable, as he usually did. Mrs. Newton said he stared at her, aghast, when she told him that his father had left on the coach. Then he had started off at a run, taking the shortcut across country to the Three Mile. + 

Michael put out his hand. He could not endure that crying. + 

“Potch!” he said. + 

At the sound of his voice, Potch was silent. After a second he struggled to his feet, and stood facing Michael. + 

“He’s gone, Michael!” he cried. + 

“He might have taken you,” Michael said. + 

“Taken me!” Potch’s exclamation did away with any idea Michael had that his son was grieving for Charley. “It wasn’t that I minded⁠—” + 

Michael did not know what to say. Potch continued: + 

“As soon as I knew, I went after him⁠—thought I’d catch up the coach at the Three Mile, and I did. I told him he’d have to come back⁠—or hand out that money. I saw you give it to him the other night and arrange about going to Warria.⁠ ⁠… Mr. Ventry pulled up. But he⁠ ⁠… set the horses going again. I tried to stop them, but the sandy bay let out a kick and they went on again.⁠ ⁠… The swine!” + 

Michael had never imagined this stolid son of Charley’s could show such fire. He was trembling with rage and indignation. Michael rarely lost his temper, but the blood rushed to his head in response to Potch’s story. Restraint was second nature with him, though, and he waited until his own and Potch’s fury had ebbed. + 

Then he moved to leave the hut. + 

“Come along,” he said. + 

“Michael!” + 

There was such breaking unbelief and joy in the cry. Michael turned and caught the boy’s expression. + 

“You’re coming along with me, Potch,” he said. + 

Potch still stood regarding him with a dazed expression of worshipful homage and gratitude. Michael put out his hand, and Potch clasped it. + 

“You and me,” he said, “we both seem to be in the same boat, Potch.⁠ ⁠… Neither of us has got a mate. I’ll be wanting someone to work with now. We’d better be mates.” + 

They went out of the hut together. + 

VI + 

Michael and Potch were at work next morning as soon as the first cuckoos were calling. Michael had been at the windlass for an hour or thereabouts, when Watty Frost, who was going along to his claim with Pony-Fence Inglewood and Bully Bryant, saw Michael on the top of his dump, tossing mullock. + 

“Who’s Michael working with?” he asked. + 

Pony-Fence and Bully Bryant considered, and shook their heads, smoking thoughtfully. + 

Snowshoes, where he lay sprawled across the slope of Crosses’ dump, glanced up at them, and the nickering wisp of a smile went through his bright eyes. The three were standing at the foot of the dump before separating. + 

“Who’s Michael got with him?” Pony-Fence inquired, looking at Snowshoes. + 

But the old man had turned his eyes back to the dump and was raking the earth with his stick again, as if he had not heard what was said. No one was deafer than Snowshoes when he did not want to hear. + 

Watty watched Michael as he bent over the windlass, his lean, slight figure cut against the clear azure of the morning sky. + 

“It’s to be hoped he’s got a decent mate this time⁠—that’s all,” he said. + 

Pony-Fence and Bully were going off to their own claim when Potch came up on the rope and stood by the windlass while Michael went down into the mine. + 

“Well!” Watty gasped, “if that don’t beat cockfighting!” + 

Bully swore sympathetically, and watched Potch set to work. The three watched him winding and throwing mullock from the hide buckets over the dump with the jerky energy of a new chum, although Potch had done odd jobs on the mines for a good many years. He had often taken his father’s turn of winding dirt, and had managed to keep himself by doing all manner of scavenging in the township since he was quite a little chap, but no one had taken him on as a mate till now. He was a big fellow, too, Potch, seventeen or eighteen; and as they looked at him Watty and Pony-Fence realised it was time someone gave Potch a chance on the mines, although after the way his father had behaved Michael was about the last person who might have been expected to give him that chance⁠—much less take him on as mate. Like father, like son, was one of those superstitions Ridge folk had not quite got away from, and the men who saw Potch working on Michael’s mine wondered that, having been let down by the father as badly as Charley had let Michael down, Michael could still work with Potch, and give him the confidence a mate was entitled to. But there was no piece of quixotism they did not think Michael capable of. The very forlornness of Potch’s position on the Ridge, and because he would have to face out and live down the fact of being Charley Heathfield’s son, were recognised as most likely Michael’s reasons for taking Potch on to work with him. + 

Watty and Pony-Fence appreciated Michael’s move and the point of view it indicated. They knew men of the Ridge would endorse it and take Potch on his merits. But being Charley’s son, Potch would have to prove those merits. They knew, too, that what Michael had done would help him to tide over the first days of shame and difficulty as nothing else could have, and it would start Potch on a better track in life than his father had ever given him. + 

Bully had already gone off to his claim when Watty and Pony-Fence separated. Watty broke the news to his mates when he joined them underground. + 

“Who do y’ think’s Michael’s new mate?” he asked. + 

George Woods rested on his pick. + 

Cash looked up from the corner where he was crouched working a streak of green-fired stone from the red floor and lower wall of the mine. + 

“Potch!” Watty threw out as George and Cash waited for the information. + 

George swept the sweat from his forehead with a broad, steady gesture. “He was bound to do something nobody else’d ’ve thought of, Michael!” he said. + 

“That’s right,” Watty replied. “Pony-Fence and Bully Bryant were saying,” he went on, “he’s had a pretty hard time, Potch, and it was about up to somebody to give him a leg-up⁠ ⁠… some sort of a start in life. He may be all right⁠ ⁠… on the other hand, there may not be much to him.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“That’s right!” Cash muttered, beginning to work again. + 

“But I reck’n he’s all right, Potch.” George swung his pick again. His blows echoed in the mine as they shattered the hard stone he was working on. + 

Watty crawled off through a drive he was gouging in. + 

At midday Michael and Charley had always eaten their lunches in the shelter where George Woods, Watty, and Cash Wilson ate theirs and noodled their opal. They wondered whether Michael would join them this day. He strolled over to the shelter with Potch beside him as Watty and Cash, with a billy of steaming tea on a stick between them, came from the open fire built round with stones, a few yards from the mine. + 

“Potch and me’s mates,” Michael explained to George as he sat down and spread out his lunch, his smile whimsical and serene over the information. “But we’re lookin’ for a third to the company. I reck’n a lot of you chaps’ luck is working on three. It’s a lucky number, three, they say.” + 

Potch sat down beside him on the outer edge of the shelter’s scrap of shade. + 

“See you get one not afraid to do a bit of work, next time⁠—that’s all I say,” Watty growled. + 

The blood oozed slowly over Potch’s heavy, quiet face. Nothing more was said of Charley, but the men who saw his face realised that Potch was not the insensible youth they had imagined. + 

Michael had watched him when they were below ground, and was surprised at the way Potch set about his work. He had taken up his father’s gouging pick and spider as if he had been used to take them every day, and he had set to work where Charley had left off. All the morning he hewed at a face of honeycombed sandstone, his face tense with concentration of energy, the sweat glistening on it as though it were oiled under the light of a candle in his spider, stuck in the red earth above him. Michael himself swung his pick in leisurely fashion, crumbled dirt, and knocked off for a smoke now and then. + 

“Easy does it, Potch,” he remarked, watching the boy’s steady slogging. “We’ve got no reason to bust ourselves in this mine.” + 

At four o’clock they put their tools back against the wall and went above ground. Michael fell in with the Crosses, who were noodling two or three good-looking pieces of opal Archie had taken out during the afternoon, and Potch streaked away through the scrub in the direction of the Old Town. + 

Michael wondered where he was going. There was a purposeful hunch about his shoulders as if he had a definite goal in view. Michael had intended asking his new mate to go down to the New Town and get the meat for their tea, but he went himself after he had yarned with Archie and Ted Cross for a while. + 

When he returned to the hut, Potch was not there. Michael made a fire, unwrapped his steak, hung it on a hook over the fire, and spread out the pannikins, tin plates and knives and forks for his meal, putting a plate and pannikin for Potch. He was kneeling before the fire giving the steak a turn when Potch came in. Potch stood in the doorway, looking at Michael as doubtfully as a stray kitten which did not know whether it might enter. + 

“That you, Potch?” Michael called. + 

“Yes,” Potch said. + 

Michael got up from the fire and carried the grilled steak on a plate to the table. + 

“Well, you were nearly late for dinner,” he remarked, as he cut the steak in half and put a piece on the other plate for Potch. “You better come along and tuck in now⁠ ⁠… there’s a great old crowd down at Nancarrow’s this evening. First time for nearly a month he’s killed a beast, and everybody wants a bit of steak. Sam gave me this as a sort of treat; and it smells good.” + 

Potch came into the kitchen and sat on the box Michael had drawn up to the table for him. + 

“Been bringing in the goats for Sophie,” he jerked out, looking at Michael as if there were some need of explanation. + 

“Oh, that was it, was it?” Michael replied, getting on with his meal. “Thought you’d flitted!” + 

Potch met his smile with a shadowy one. A big, clumsy-looking fellow, with a dull, colourless face and dingy hair, he sat facing Michael, his eyes anxious, as though he would like to explain further, but was afraid to, or could not find words. His eyes were beautiful; but they were his father’s eyes, and Michael recoiled to qualms of misgiving, a faint distrust, as he looked in them. + 

It was Ed Ventry, however, who gave Potch his first claim to the respect of men of the Ridge. + 

“How’s that boy of Charley Heathfield’s?” was his first question when the coach came in from Budda, the following week. + 

“All right,” Newton said. “Why?” + 

“He was near killed,” Mr. Ventry replied. “Stopped us up at the Three Mile that morning I was taking Charley and Jun down. He was all for Charley stopping⁠ ⁠… getting off the coach or something. I didn’t get what it was all about⁠—money Charley’d got from Michael, I think. That’s the worst of bein’ a bit hard of hearin’⁠ ⁠… and bein’ battered about by that yaller-bay horse I bought at Warria couple of months ago.” + 

“Potch tried to stop Charley getting away, did he?” Newton asked with interest. + 

“He did,” Ed Ventry declared. “I pulled up, seein’ something was wrong⁠ ⁠… but what does that goddamned blighter Charley do but give a lurch and grab me reins. Scared four months’ growth out of the horses⁠—and away they went. I’d a colt I was breakin’ in on the offside⁠—and he landed Potch one⁠—kicked him right out, I thought. As soon as I could, I pulled up, but I see Potch making off across the plain, and he didn’t look like he was much hurt.⁠ ⁠… But it was a plucky thing he did, all right⁠ ⁠… and it’s the last time I’ll drive Charley Heathfield. I told him straight. I’d as soon kill a man as not for putting a hand on me reins, like he done⁠—on me own coach, too!” + 

Snowshoes had drifted up to them as the coach stopped and Newton went out to it. He stood beside Peter Newton while Mr. Ventry talked, rolling tobacco. Snowshoes’ eyes glimmered from one to the other of them when Ed Ventry had given the reason for his inquiry. + 

“Potch!” he murmured. “A little bit of potch!” And marched off down the road, a straight, stately white figure, on the bare track under the azure of the sky. + 

VII + 

“Give y’ three,” Watty said. + 

“Take ’em.” George Woods did not turn. He was carefully working round a brilliantly fired seam through black potch in the shin cracker he had been breaking through two or three days before. + 

It was about lunch time, and Watty had crawled from his drive to the centre of the mine. Cash was still at work, crouched against a corner of the alley, a hundred yards or so from George; but he laid down his pick when he heard Watty’s voice, and went towards him. + 

“Who d’you think Michael’s got as third man?” + 

“Snowshoes?” + 

“No.” + 

“Old Bill Olsen?” + 

Watty could not contain himself to the third guess. + 

“Rum-Enough!” he said. + 

“He would.” George chipped at the stone round his colour. “It was bound to be a lame dog, anyhow⁠—and it might as well’ve been Rummy as anybody.” + 

“That’s right,” Cash conceded. + 

“Bill Andrews told me,” Watty said. “They’ve just broke through on the other side of that drive I’m in.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“It would be all right,” he went on, “if Paul’d work for Michael like he did for Jun. But is Michael the man to make him? Not by long chalks. Potch is turning out all right, the boys say.⁠ ⁠… Michael says he works like a chow⁠ ⁠… has to make him put in the peg⁠ ⁠… but they’ll both be havin’ Rum-Enough on their hands before long⁠—that’s a sure thing.” + 

Watty’s, George’s, and Cash’s mine was one of the best worked and best planned on the fields. + 

Watty and Cash inspected the streak George was working, and speculated as to what it would yield. George leaned his pick against the wall, eager, too, about the chances of what the thread of fire glittering in the black potch would lead to. But he was proud of the mine as well as the stone it had produced. It represented the first attempt to work a claim systematically on the Ridge. George himself had planned and prospected every inch of it; and before he went above ground for the midday meal, he glanced about it as usual, affirming his pride and satisfaction; but his eyes fell on the broken white stone about his pitch. + 

“As soon as we get her out, I’ll shift that stuff,” he said. + 

When they went up for their meal, Michael did not join Watty, George, and Cash as usual. He spread out his lunch and sat with Paul and Potch in the shade of some wilgas beside his own mine. He knew that Rouminof would not be welcome in George and Watty’s shelter, and that Paul and Potch would bring a certain reserve to the discussions of Ridge affairs which took place there. + 

Potch saw Michael’s eyes wander to where George was sitting yarning with his mates. He knew Michael would rather have been over there; and yet Michael seemed pleased to have got his own mine in working order again. He talked over ways of developing it with Paul, asking his opinion, and explaining why he believed the claim was good enough to stick to for a while longer, although very little valuable stone had come out of it. Potch wondered why his eyes rested on Paul with that faint smile of satisfaction. + 

The Ridge discussed Michael and his new partnership backwards and forth, and back again. Michael knew that, and was as amused as the rest of the Ridge at the company he was keeping. Although he sat with his own mates at midday, he was as often as not with the crowd under Newton’s veranda in the evening, discussing and settling the affairs of the Ridge and of the universe. After a while he was more like his old self than he had been for a long time⁠—since Mrs. Rouminof’s death⁠—people said, when they saw him going about again with a quiet smile and whimsical twist to his mouth. + 

The gossips had talked a good deal about Michael and Mrs. Rouminof, but neither she nor he had bothered their heads about the gossips. + 

Michael and Mrs. Rouminof had often been seen standing and talking together when she was going home from the New Town with stores, or when Michael was coming in from his hut. He had usually walked back along the road with her, she for the most part, if it was in the evening, with no hat on; he smoking the stubby black pipe that was rarely out of his mouth. There was something in the way Mrs. Rouminof walked beside Michael, in the way her hair blew out in tiny strands curling in the wind and taking stray glints of light, in the way she smiled with a vague underlying sweetness when she looked at Michael; there was something in the way Michael slouched and smoked beside Mrs. Rouminof, too, which made their meeting look more than any mere ordinary talking and walking home together of two people. That was what Mrs. Watty Frost said. + 

Mrs. Watty believed it was her duty in life to maintain the prejudices of respectable society in Fallen Star township. She had a constitutional respect for authority in whatever form it manifested itself. She stood for washing on Monday, spring-cleaning, keeping herself to herself, and uncompromising hostility to anything in the shape of a new idea which threatened the old order of domesticity on the Ridge. And she let everybody know it. She never went into the one street of the township even at night without a hat on, and wore gloves whenever she walked abroad. A little woman, with a mean, sour face, wrinkled like a walnut, and small, bead-bright eyes, Mrs. Watty was one of those women who are all energy and have no children to absorb their energies. She put all her energy into resentment of the Ridge and the conditions Watty had settled down to so comfortably and happily. She sighed for shops and a suburb of Sydney, and repeatedly told Watty how nice it would be to have a little milk shop near Sydney like her father and mother had had. + 

But Watty would not hear of the milk shop. He loved the Ridge, and the milk shop was an evergreen bone of contention between him and his wife. The only peace he ever got was when Mrs. Watty went away to Sydney for a holiday, or he went with her, because she would rarely go away without him. She could not be happy without Watty, people said. She had no one to growl to and let off her irritation about things in general at, if he were not there. Watty grew fat, and was always whistling cheerily, nevertheless. Mrs. Watty cooked like an archangel, he said; and, to give her her due, the men admitted that although she had never pretended to approve of the life they led, Mrs. Watty had been a good wife to Watty. + 

But everybody, even Mrs. Watty, was as pleased as if a little fortune had come to them, when, towards the end of their first week, Michael and his company came on a patch of good stone. Michael struck it, following the lead he had been working for some time, and, although not wonderful in colour or quality, the opal cut out at about ten ounces and brought £3 an ounce. Michael was able to wipe out some of his grocery score, so was Paul, and Potch had money to burn. + 

Paul was very pleased with himself about it. The men began to call him a mascot and to say he had brought Michael luck, as he had Jun Johnson. There was no saying how the fortunes of the new partnership might flourish, if he stuck to it. Paul, responding to the expressions of goodwill and the inspiration of being on opal, put all his childish and bullocky energy into working with Michael and Potch. + 

He still told everybody who would listen to him the story of the wonderful stones he had found when he was working with Jun, and how they had been stolen from him. They grew in number, value, and size every time he spoke of them. And he wailed over what he had been going to do, and what selling the stones would have meant to him and to Sophie. But the partnership was working better than anybody had expected, and people began to wonder whether, after all, Michael had done so badly for himself with his brace of deadbeat mates. + 

VIII + 

In a few weeks thought of the robbery had ceased greatly to disturb anybody. Michael settled down to working with his new mates, and the Ridge accepted the new partnership as the most natural thing in the world. + 

Life on the Ridge is usually as still as an inland lake. The settlement is just that, a lake of life, in the country of wide plains stretching westwards for hundreds on hundreds of miles, broken only by shingly ridges to the sea, and eastwards, through pastoral districts, to the coastal ranges, and the seaboard with its busy towns, ports, and cities. + 

In summer the plains are dead and dry; in a drought, deserts. The great coolebahs standing with their feet in the river ways are green, and scatter tattered shade. Their small, round leaves flash like mirrors in the sun, and when the river water vanishes from about their feet, they hold themselves in the sandy shallow bed of the rivers as if waiting with imperturbable faith for the return of the waters. The surface of the dry earth cracks. There are huge fissures where the water lay in clayey hollows during the winter and spring. Along the stock routes and beside the empty water-holes, sheep and cattle lie rotting. Their carcasses, disembowelled by the crows, put an odour of putrefaction in the air. The sky burns iron-grey with heat. The dust rises in heavy reddish mist about stockmen or cattle on the roads. + 

But after the rains, in the winter or spring of a good season, the seeds break sheath in a few hours; they sprout overnight, and a green mantle is flung over the old earth which a few days before was as dead and dry as a desert. In a little time the country is a flowering wilderness. Trefoil, crow’s-foot, clover, mallow, and wild mustard riot, tangling and interweaving. The cattle browse through them lazily; stringing out across the flowering fields, they look in the distance no more than droves of mice; their red and black backs alone are visible above the herbage. In places, wild candytuft in blossom spreads a quilt of palest lavender in every direction on a wide circling horizon. Darling pea, the colour of violets and smelling like them, threads through the candytuft and lies in wedges, magenta and dark purple against the skyline, a hundred miles farther on. The sky is a wash of pale, exquisite blue, which deepens as it rises to the zenith. The herbage glows beneath it, so clear and pure is the light. + 

Farther inland, for miles, bachelor’s buttons paint the earth raw gold. Not a hair’s breadth of colour shows on the plains except the dull red of the road winding through them and the blue of the sky overhead. Paper daisies fringe the gold, and then they lie, white as snow, for miles, under the bare blue sky. Sometimes the magenta, purple, lavender, gold and white of the herbage and wild flowers merge and mingle, and a tapestry of incomparable beauty⁠—a masterpiece of the Immortals⁠—is wrought on the bare earth. + 

During the spring and early summer of a good season, the air is filled with the wild, thymey odour of herbs, and the dry, musky fragrance of paper daisies. The crying of lambs, the baaing of ewes, and the piping of mud-larks⁠—their thin, silvery notes⁠—go through the clear air and are lost over the flowering land and against the blue sky. + 

Winter is rarely more than a season of rains on the Ridge. Cold winds blow from the inland plains for a week or two. There are nights of frost and sparkling stars. People shiver and crouch over their fires; but the days have rarely more than a fresh tang in the air. + 

The rains as often as not are followed by floods. After a few days’ steady downpour, the shallow rivers and creeks on the plains overflow, and their waters stretch out over the plains for thirteen, fourteen, and sometimes twenty miles. Fords become impassable; bridges are washed away. Fallen Star Ridge is cut off from the rest of the world until the flood waters have soaked into the earth, as they do after a few days, and the coach can take to the road again. + 

As spring passes into summer, the warmth of the sunshine loses its mildness, and settles to a heavy taciturnity. The light, losing its delicate brilliance, becomes a bared sword-blade striking the eyes. Everything shrinks from the full gaze and blaze of the sun. Eyes ache, the brain reels with the glare; mirages dance on the limitless horizons. The scorched herbage falls into dust; water is drawn off from rivers and water-holes. All day the air is heavy and still; the sky the colour of iron. + 

Nights are heavy and still as the days, and people turn wearily from the glow in the east at dawn; but the days go on, for months, one after the other, hot, breathless, of dazzling radiance, or wrapped in the red haze of a dust storm. + 

Ridge folk take the heat as primitive people do most acts of God, as a matter of course, with stiff-lipped hardihood, which makes complaint the manifestation of a poor spirit. They meet their difficulties with a native humour which gives zest to flagging energies. Their houses, with roofs whitened to throw off the heat, the dumps of crumbling white clay, and the iron roofs of the billiard parlour, the hotel, and Watty Frost’s new house at the end of the town, shimmer in the intense light. At a little distance they seem all quivering and dancing together. + 

Men like Michael, the Crosses, George Woods, Watty, and women like Maggie Grant and Martha M’Cready, who had been on the Ridge a long time, become inured to the heat. At least, they say that they “do not mind it.” No one hears a growl out of them, even when water is scarce and flies and mosquitoes a plague. Their good spirits and grit keep the community going through a trying summer. But even they raise their faces to heaven when an unexpected shower comes, or autumn rains fall a little earlier than usual. + 

In the early days, before stations were fenced, Bill M’Gaffy, a Warria shepherd, grazing flocks on the plains, declared he had seen a star fall on the Ridge. When he went into the station he showed the scraps of marl and dark metallic stone he had picked up near where the star had fallen, to James Henty, who had taken up Warria Station. The Ridge lay within its boundary. James Henty had turned them over curiously, and surmised that some meteoric stone had fallen on the Ridge. The place had always been called Fallen Star Ridge after that; but opal was not found there, and it did not begin to be known as the black opal field until several years later. + 

In the first days of the rush to the Ridge, men of restless, reckless temperament had foregathered at the Old Town. There had been wild nights at the shanty. But the wilder spirits soon drifted away to Pigeon Creek and the sapphire mines, and the sober and more serious of the miners had settled to life on the new fields. + 

The first gathering of huts on the clay pan below the Ridge was known as the Old Town; but it had been flooded so often, that, after people had been washed out of their homes, and had been forced to take to the Ridge for safety two or three times, it was decided to move the site of the township to the brow of the Ridge, above the range of the flood waters and near the new rush, where the most important mines on the field promised to be. + 

A year or two ago, a score or so of bark and bag huts were ranged on either side of the wide, unmade road space overgrown with herbage, and a smithy, a weatherboard hotel with roof of corrugated iron, a billiard parlour, and a couple of stores, comprised the New Town. A wild cherry tree, gnarled and ancient, which had been left in the middle of the road near the hotel, bore the news of the district and public notices, nailed to it on sheets of paper. A little below the hotel, on the same side, Chassy Robb’s store served as post-office, and the nearest approach to a medicine shop in the township. Opposite was the Afghan’s emporium. And behind the stores and the miners’ huts, everywhere, were the dumps thrown up from mines and old rushes. + 

There was no police station nearer than fifty miles, and although telegraph now links the New Town with Budda, the railway town, communication with it for a long time was only by coach once or twice a week; and even now all the fetching and carrying is done by a four or six horse-coach and bullock-wagons. The community to all intents and purposes governs itself according to popular custom and popular opinion, the seat of government being Newton’s big, earthen-floored bar, or the brushwood shelters near the mines in which the men sit at midday to eat their lunches and noodle⁠—, go over, snip, and examine⁠—the opal they have taken out of the mines during the morning. + 

They hold their blocks of land by miner’s right, and their houses are their own. They formally recognise that they are citizens of the Commonwealth and of the State of New South Wales, by voting at elections and by accepting the Federal postal service. Some few of them, as well as Newton and the storekeepers, pay income tax as compensation for those privileges; but beyond that the Ridge lives its own life, and the enactments of external authority are respected or disregarded as best pleases it. + 

A sober, easygoing crowd, the Ridge miners do not trouble themselves much about law. They have little need of it. They live in accord with certain fundamental instincts, on terms of good fellowship with each other. + 

“To go back on a mate,” is recognised as the major crime of the Ridge code. + 

Sometimes, during a rush, the wilder spirits who roam from one mining camp to another in the back-country, drift back, and “hit things up” on the Ridge, as the men say. But they soon drift away again. Sometimes, if one of them strikes a good patch of opal and outstays his kind, as often as not he sinks into the Ridge life, absorbs Ridge ways and ideas, and is accepted into the fellowship of men of the Ridge. There is no formality about the acceptance. It just happens naturally, that if a man identifies himself with the Ridge principle of mateship, and will stand by it as it will stand by him, he is recognised by Ridge men as one of themselves. But if his ways and ideas savour of those the Ridge has broken from, he remains an outsider, whatever good terms he may seem to be on with everybody. + 

Sometimes a rush leaves a shiftless ne’er-do-well or two for the Ridge to reckon with, but even these rarely disregard the Ridge code. If claims are ratted it is said there are strangers about, and the miners deal with rats according to their own ideas of justice. On the last occasion it was applied, this justice had proved so effectual that there had been no repetition of the offence. + 

Ridge miners find happiness in the sense of being free men. They are satisfied in their own minds that it is not good for a man to work all day at any mechanical toil; to use himself or allow anyone else to use him like a working bullock. A man must have time to think, leisure to enjoy being alive, they say. Is he alive only to work? To sleep worn out with toil, and work again? It is not good enough, Ridge men say. They have agreed between themselves that it is a fair thing to begin work about 6:30 or 7 o’clock and knock off about four, with a couple of hours above ground at noon for lunch⁠—a snack of bread and cheese and a cup of tea. + 

At four o’clock they come up from the mines, noodle their opal, put on their coats, smoke and yarn, and saunter down to the town and their homes. And it is this leisure end of the day which has given life on the Ridge its tone of peace and quiet happiness, and has made Ridge miners the thoughtful, well-informed men most of them are. + 

To a man they have decided against allowing any wealthy man or body of wealthy men forming themselves into a company to buy up the mines, put the men on a weekly wage, and work them, as the opal blocks at Chalk Cliffs had been worked. There might be more money in it, there would be a steadier means of livelihood; but the Ridge miners will not hear of it. + 

“No,” they say; “we’ll put up with less money⁠—and be our own masters.” + 

Most of them worked on Chalk Cliffs’ opal blocks, and they realised in the early days of the new field the difference between the conditions they had lived and worked under on the Cliffs and were living and working under on the Ridge, where every man was the proprietor of his own energies, worked as long as he liked, and was entitled to the full benefit of his labour. They had yarned over these differences of conditions at midday in the shelters beside the mines, discussed them in the long evenings at Newton’s, and without any committees, documents, or bond⁠—except the common interest of the individual and of the fraternity⁠—had come to the conclusion that at all costs they were going to remain masters of their own mines. + 

Common thought and common experience were responsible for that recognition of economic independence as the first value of their new life together. Michael Brady had stood for it from the earliest days of the settlement. He had pointed out that the only things which could give joy in life, men might have on the Ridge, if they were satisfied to find their joy in these things, and not look for it in enjoyment of the superficial luxuries money could provide. Most of the real sources of joy were every man’s inheritance, but conditions of work, which wrung him of energy and spirit, deprived him of leisure to enjoy them until he was too weary to do more than sleep or seek the stimulus of alcohol. Besides, these conditions recruited him with the merest subsistence for his pains, very often⁠—did not even guarantee that⁠—and denied him the capacity to appreciate the real sources of joy. But the beauty of the world, the sky, and the stars, spring, summer, the grass, and the birds, were for every man, Michael said. Any and every man could have immortal happiness by hearing a bird sing, by gazing into the blue-dark depths of the sky on a starry night. No man could sell his joy of these things. No man could buy them. Love is for all men: no man can buy or sell love. Pleasure in work, in jolly gatherings with friends, peace at the end of the day, and satisfaction of his natural hungers, a man might have all these things on the Ridge, if he were content with essentials. + 

Ridge miners’ live fearlessly, with the magic of adventure in their daily lives, the prospect of one day finding the great stone which is the grail of every opal-miner’s quest. They are satisfied if they get enough opal to make a parcel for a buyer when he puts up for a night or two at Newton’s. A young man who sells good stones usually goes off to Sydney to discover what life in other parts of the world is like, and to take a draught of the gay life of cities. A married man gives his wife and children a trip to the seaside or a holiday in town. But all drift back to the Ridge when the taste of city life has begun to cloy, or when all their money is spent. Once an opal miner, always an opal miner, the Ridge folk say. + 

Among the men, only the shiftless and more worthless are not in sympathy with Ridge ideas, and talk of money and what money will buy as the things of first value in life. They describe the Fallen Star township as a Godforsaken hole, and promise each other, as soon as their luck has turned, they will leave it forever, and have the time of their lives in Sydney. + 

Women like Maggie Grant share their husband’s minds. They read what the men read, have the men’s vision, and hold it with jealous enthusiasm. Others, women used to the rough and simple existence of the back-country, are satisfied with the life which gives them a husband, home, and children. Those who sympathise with Mrs. Watty Frost regard the men’s attitude as more than half cussedness, sheer selfishness or stick-in-the-mudness; and the more worthy and respectable they are, the more they fret and fume at the earthen floors and open hearths of the bark and bagging huts they live in, and pine for all the kickshaws of suburban villas. The discontented women are a minority, nevertheless. Ridge folk as a whole have set their compass and steer the course of their lives with unconscious philosophy, and yet a profound conviction as to the rightness of what they are doing. + 

And the Ridge, which bears them, stands serenely under blue skies the year long, rising like a backbone from the plains that stretch for hundreds of miles on either side. A wide, dusty road crosses the plains. The huts of the Three Mile and Fallen Star crouch beside it, and everywhere on the rusty, shingle-strewn slopes of the Ridge, are the holes and thrown-up heaps of white and raddled clay or broken sandstone⁠—traces of the search for that “ecstasy in the heart of gloom,” black opal, which the Fallen Star earth holds. + 

IX + 

Darling pea was lying in purple and magenta patches through the long grass on the tank paddock when Sophie went with Ella and Mirry Flail to gather wild flowers there. + 

Wild flowers did not grow anywhere on Fallen Star as they did in the tank paddock. It was almost a place of faery to children of the Ridge. The little ones were not allowed to go there by themselves for fear they might fall into the waterhole which lay like a great square lake in the middle of it, its steep, well-set-up banks of yellow clay, ruled with the precision of a diagram in geometry. The water was almost as yellow as the banks, thick and muddy looking; but it was good water, nothing on earth the matter with it when you had boiled it and the sediment had been allowed to settle, everybody on Fallen Star Ridge was prepared to swear. It had to be drawn up by a pump which was worked by a donkey engine, Sam Nancarrow, and his old fat roan draught mare, and carted to the township when rainwater in the iron tanks beside the houses in Fallen Star gave out. + 

During a dry season, or a very hot summer, all hands turned out to roof the paddock tank with tarpaulins to prevent evaporation as far as possible and so conserve the township’s water supply. On a placard facing the roadway a “severe penalty” was promised to anyone using it without permission or making improper use of it. + 

Ella and Mirry were gathering sago flower⁠—“wild sweet Alice,” as they called candytuft⁠—yellow eye-bright, tiny pink starry flowers, bluebells, small lavender daisies, taller white ones, and yellow daisies, as well as Darling pea; but Sophie picked only long, trailing stalks of the pea. She had as many as she could hold when she sat down to arrange them into a tighter bunch. + 

Mirry and Ella Flail had always been good friends of Sophie’s. Potch and she had often gone on excursions with them, or to the swamp to cart water when it was scarce and very dear in the township. And since Potch had gone to work Sophie had no one to go about with but Mirry and Ella. She pleased their mother by trying to teach them to read and write, and they went noodling together, or gathering wild flowers. Sophie was three or four years older than Mirry, who was the elder of the two Flails; she felt much older since her mother’s death nearly a year ago, and in the black dress she had worn since then. She was just seventeen, and had put her hair up into a knot at the back of her head. That made her feel older, too. But she still liked to go for walks and wanderings with Ella and Mirry. They knew so much about the birds and flowers, the trees, and the ways of all the wild creatures: they were such wild creatures themselves. + 

They came running to her, crying excitedly, their hands filled with flowers, shedding them as they ran. Then, collapsing in the grass beside Sophie, Mirry rolled over on her back and gazed up into the sky. Ella, squatting on her thin, sunburnt little sticks of legs, was arranging her flowers and glancing every now and then at Sophie with shy, loving glances. + 

Sophie wondered why she had nothing of her old joyous zest in their enterprises together. She used to be as wild and happy as Mirry and Ella on an afternoon like this. But there was something of the shy, wild spirit of a primitive people about Mirry and Ella, she remembered, some of their blood, too. One of their mother’s people, it was said, had been a native of one of the river tribes. + 

Mirry had her mother’s beautiful dark eyes, almost green in the light, and freckled with hazel, and her pale, sallow skin. Ella, younger and shyer, was more like her father. Her skin was not any darker than Sophie’s, and her eyes blue-grey, her features delicate, her hair golden-brown that glinted in the sun. + 

“Sing to us, Sophie,” Mirry said. + 

Sophie often sang to them when she and Ella and Mirry were out like this. As she sat with them, dreaming in the sunshine, she sang almost without any conscious effort; she just put up her chin, and the melodies poured from her. Hearing her voice, as it ran in ripples and eddies through the clear, warm air, hung and quivered and danced again, delighted her. + 

Ella and Mirry listened in a trance of awe, reverence, and admiration. Sophie had a dim vision of them, wide-eyed and still, against the tall grass and flowers. + 

“My! You can sing, Sophie! Can’t she, Ella?” + 

Ella nodded, gazing at Sophie with eyes of worshipping love. + 

“They say you’re going away with your father⁠ ⁠… and you’re going to be a great singer, Sophie,” Mirry said. + 

“Yes,” Sophie murmured tranquilly, “I am.” + 

A bevy of black and brown birds flashed past them, flew in a wide half-circle across the paddock, and alighted on a dead tree beyond the fence. + 

“Look, look!” Mirry started to her feet. “A happy family! I wonder, are the whole twelve there?” + 

She counted the birds, which were calling to each other with little shrill cries. + 

“They’re all there!” she announced. “Twelve of them. Mother says in some parts they call them the twelve apostles. Sing again, Sophie,” she begged. + 

Ella smiled at Sophie. Her lips parted as though she would like to have said that, too; but only her eyes entreated, and she went on putting her flowers together. + 

As she sang, Sophie watched a pair of butterflies, white with black lines and splashes of yellow and scarlet on their wings, hovering over the flowered field of the paddock. She was so lost in her singing and watching the butterflies, and the children were so intent listening to her, that they did not hear a horseman coming slowly towards them along the track. As he came up to them, Sophie’s rippling notes broke and fell to earth. Ella saw him first, and was on her feet in an instant. Mirry and she, their wild instinct asserting itself, darted away and took cover behind the trunks of the nearest trees. + 

Sophie looked after them, wondering whether she would follow them as she used to; but she felt older and more staid now than she had a year ago. She stood her ground, as the man, who was leading his horse, came to a standstill before her. + 

She knew him well enough, Arthur Henty, the only son of old Henty of Warria Station. She had seen him riding behind cattle or sheep on the roads across the plains for years. Sometimes when Potch and she had met him riding across the Ridge, or at the swamp, he had stopped to talk to them. He had been at her mother’s funeral, too; but as he stood before her this afternoon, Sophie seemed to be seeing him for the first time. + 

A tall, slightly-built young man, in riding breeches and leggings, a worn coat, and as weathered a felt hat as any man on the Ridge wore, his clothes the colour of dust on the roads, he stood before her, smiling slightly. His face was dark in the shadow of his hat, but the whole of him, cut against the sunshine, had gilded outlines. And he seemed to be seeing Sophie for the first time, too. She had jumped up and drawn back from the track when the Flails ran away. He could not believe that this tall girl in the black dress was the queer, elfish-like girl he had seen running about the Ridge, bare-legged, with feet in goatskin sandals, and in the cemetery on the Warria road, not much more than a year ago. Her elfish gaiety had deserted her. It was the black dress gave her face the warm pallor of ivory, he thought, made her look staider, and as if the sadness of all it symbolised had not left her. But her eyes, strange, beautiful eyes, the green and blue of opal, with black rings on the irises and great black pupils, had still the clear, unconscious gaze of youth; her lips the sweet, sucking curves of a child’s. + 

They stood so, smiling and staring at each other, a spell of silence on each. + 

Sophie had dropped half her flowers as she sprang up at the sound of someone approaching. She had clutched a few in one hand; the rest lay on the grass about her, her hat beside them. Henty’s eyes went to the trees round which Mirry and Ella were peeping. + 

“They’re wild birds, aren’t they?” he said. + 

Sophie smiled. She liked the way his eyes narrowed to slits of sunshine as he smiled. + 

“Are you going to sing, again?” he asked hesitatingly. + 

Sophie shook her head. + 

“My mother’s awfully fond of that stuff,” Henty said, looking at the Darling pea Sophie had in her hand. “We haven’t got any near the homestead. I came into the paddock to get some for her.” + 

Sophie held out her bunch. + 

“Not all of it,” he said. + 

“I can get more,” she said. + 

He took the flowers, and his vague smile changed to one of shy and subtle understanding. Ella and Mirry found courage to join Sophie. + 

“Where’s Potch?” Henty asked. + 

“He’s working with Michael,” Sophie said. + 

“Oh!” he exclaimed, and stood before her awkwardly, not knowing what to talk about. + 

He was still thinking how different she was to the little girl he had seen chasing goats on the Ridge no time before, and wondering what had changed her so quickly, when Sophie stooped to pick up her hat. Then he saw her short, dark hair twisted up into a knot at the back of her head. Feeling intuitively that he was looking at the knot she was so proud of, Sophie put on her hat quickly. A delicate colour moved on her neck and cheeks. Arthur Henty found himself looking into her suffused eyes and smiling at her smile of confusion. + 

“Well, we must be going now,” Sophie said, a little breathlessly. + 

Henty said that he was going into the New Town and would walk along part of the way with her. He tucked the flowers Sophie had given him into his saddlebag, and she and the children turned down the track. Ella, having found her tongue, chattered eagerly. Arthur Henty strolled beside them, smoking, his reins over his arm. Mirry wanted to ride his horse. + 

“Nobody rides this horse but me,” Henty said. “She’d throw you into the middle of next week.” + 

“I can ride,” Mirry said; “ride like a flea, the boys say.” + 

She was used to straddling any pony or horse her brothers had in the yard, and they had a name as the best horse-breakers in the district. + 

Henty laughed. “But you couldn’t ride Beeswing,” he said. “She doesn’t let anybody but me ride her. You can sit on, if you like; she won’t mind that so long as I’ve got hold of her.” + 

The stirrup was too high for Mirry to reach, so he picked her up and put her across the saddle. The mare shivered and shrank under the light shock of Mirry’s landing upon her, but Arthur Henty talked to her and rubbed her head soothingly. + 

“It’s all right⁠ ⁠… all right, old girl,” he muttered. “Think it was one of those stinging flies? But it isn’t, you see. It’s only Mirry Flail. She says she’s a flea of a rider. But you’d learn her, wouldn’t you, if you got off with her by yourself?” + 

Ella giggled softly, peering at Mirry and Henty and at the beautiful golden-red chestnut he was leading. Ed Ventry had put Sophie on his coach horses sometimes. He had let her go for a scamper with Potch on an old horse or a likely colt now and then; but she knew she did not ride well⁠—not as Mirry rode. + 

They walked along the dusty road together when they had left the tank paddock, Mirry chattering from Beeswing’s back, Sophie, with Ella clinging to one hand, on the other side of Henty. But Mirry soon tired of riding a led horse at a snail’s pace. When a sulphur-coloured butterfly fluttered for a few minutes over a wild tobacco plant, she slid from the saddle, on the far side, and was off over the plains to have another look at the butterfly. + 

Ella was too shy or too frightened to get on the chestnut, even with Henty holding her bridle. + 

“How about you, Sophie?” Arthur Henty asked. + 

Sophie nodded, but before he could help her she had put her foot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle herself. Beeswing shivered again to the new, strange weight on her back. Henty held her, muttering soothingly. They went on again. + 

After a while, with a shy glance, and as if to please him, Sophie began to sing, softly at first, so as not to startle the mare, and then letting her voice out so that it rippled as easily and naturally as a bird’s. Henty, walking with a hand on the horse’s bridle beside her, heard again the song she had been singing in the tank paddock. + 

Ella was supposed to be carrying Sophie’s flowers. She did not know she had dropped nearly half of them, and that they were lying in a trail all along the dusty road. + 

Henty did not speak when Sophie had finished. His pipe had gone out, and he put it in his pocket. The stillness of her audience of two was so intense that to escape it Sophie went on singing, and the chestnut did not flinch. She went quietly to the pace of the song, as though she, too, were enjoying its rapture and tenderness. + 

Then through the clear air came a rattle of wheels and jingle of harness. Mirry, running towards them from the other side of the road, called eagerly: + 

“It’s the coach.⁠ ⁠… Mr. Ventry’s got six horses in, and a man with him!” + 

Six horses indicated that a person of some importance was on board the coach. Henty drew the chestnut to one side as the coach approached. Mr. Ventry jerked his head in Henty’s direction when he passed and saw Arthur Henty with the Flail children and Sophie. The stranger beside him eyed, with a faint smile of amusement, the cavalcade, the girl in the black dress on the fine chestnut horse, the children with the flowers, and the young man standing beside them. The man on the coach was a clean-shaved, well-groomed, rather good-looking man of forty, or thereabouts, and his clothes and appearance proclaimed him a man of the world beyond the Ridge. His smile and stare annoyed Henty. + 

“It’s Mr. Armitage,” Mirry said. “The young one. He’s not as nice as the old man, my father says⁠—and he doesn’t know opal as well⁠—but he gives a good price.” + 

They had reached the curve of the road where one arm turns to the town and the other goes over the plains to Warria. Sophie slipped from the horse. + 

“We’ll take the shortcut here,” she said. + 

She stood looking at Arthur Henty for a moment, and in that moment Henty knew that she had sensed his thought. She had guessed he was afraid of having looked ridiculous trailing along the road with these children. Sophie turned away. The young Flails bounded after her. Henty could hear their laughter when he had ridden out some distance along the road. + 

From the slope of a dump Sophie saw him⁠—the chestnut and her rider loping into the sunset, and, looking after him, she finished her song. + 

“Caro nome che il mio cor festi primo palpitar, + 

Le delizie dell’ amor mi dei sempre rammentar! + 

Col pensier il mio desir a te sempre volerà, + 

A fin l’ultimo sospir, caro nome, tuo sarà!” + 

The long, sweet notes and rippled melody followed Arthur Henty over the plains in the quiet air of late afternoon. But the afternoon had been spoilt for him. He was self-conscious and ill at ease about it all. + 

X + 

“Mr. Armitage is up at Newton’s!” Paul yelled to Michael, when he saw him at his back door a few minutes after Sophie had given him the news. + 

“Not the old man?” Michael inquired. + 

“No, the young ’un.” + 

Word was quickly bruited over the fields that the American, one of the best buyers who came to the Ridge, had arrived by the evening coach. He invariably had a good deal of money to spend, and gave a better price than most of the local buyers. + 

Dawe P. Armitage had visited Fallen Star Ridge from the first year of its existence as an opal field, and every year for years after that. But when he began to complain about aches and pains in his bones, which he refused to allow anybody to call rheumatism, and was assured he was well over seventy and that the long rail and sea journey from New York City to Fallen Star township were getting too much for him, he let his son, whom he had made a partner in his business, make the journey for him. John Lincoln Armitage had been going to the Ridge for two or three years, and although the men liked him well enough, he was not as popular with them as his father had been. And the old man, John Armitage said, although he was nearly crippled with rheumatism, still grudged him his yearly visit to the Ridge, and hated like poison letting anyone else do his opal-buying. + 

Dawe Armitage had bought some of the best black opal found on the Ridge. He had been a hard man to deal with, but the men had a grudging admiration for him, a sort of fellow feeling of affection because of his oneness with them in a passion for black opal. A grim, sturdy old beggar, there was a certain quality about him, a gruff humour, sheer doggedness, strength of purpose, and dead honesty within his point of view, which kept an appreciative and kindly feeling for him in their hearts. They knew he had preyed on them; but he had done it bluntly, broadly, and in such an off-with-the-gloves-lads-style, that, after a good fight over a stone and price, they had sometimes given in to him for sheer amusement, and to let him have the satisfaction of thinking he had gained his point. + 

Usually he set his price on a stone and would not budge from it. The gougers knew this, and if their price on a stone was not Dawe Armitage’s, they did not waste breath on argument, except to draw the old boy and get some diversion from his way of playing them. If a man had a good stone and did not think anyone else was likely to give him his figure, sometimes he sold ten minutes before the coach Armitage was going down to town by, left Newton’s. But, three or four times, when a stone had taken his fancy and a miner was obdurate, the old man, with his mind’s eye full of the stone and the fires in its dazzling jet, had suddenly sent for it and its owner, paid his price, and pocketed the stone. He had wrapped up the gem, chuckling in defeat, and rejoicing to have it at any price. As a rule he made three or four times as much as he had given for opals he bought on the Ridge, but to Dawe Armitage the satisfaction of making money on a transaction was nothing like the joy of putting a coveted treasure into his wallet and driving off from Fallen Star with it. + 

A gem merchant of considerable standing in the United States, Dawe Armitage’s collection of opals was world famous. He had put black opal on the market, and had been the first to extol the splendour of the stones found on Fallen Star Ridge. So different they were from the opal found on Chalk Cliffs, or in any other part of the world, with the fires in jetty potch rather than in the clear or milky medium people were accustomed to, that at first timid and conventional souls were disturbed and repelled by them. “They felt,” they said, “that there was something occultly evil about black opal.” They had a curious fear and dread of the stones as talismans of evil. Dawe Armitage scattered the quakers like chaff with his scorn. They could not, he said, accept the magnificent pessimism of black opal. They would not rejoice with pagan abandonment in the beauty of those fires in black opal, realising that, like the fires of life, they owed their brilliance, their transcendental glory, to the dark setting. But every day the opals made worshippers of sightseers. They mesmerised beholders who came to look at them. + 

When the coach rattled to a standstill outside the hotel, Peter Newton went to the door of the bar. He knew John Armitage by the size and shape of his dust-covered overalls. Armitage dismounted and pulled off his gloves. Peter Newton went to meet him. + 

Armitage gripped his hand. + 

“Mighty glad to see you, Newton,” he said, “and glad to see the Ridge again. How are you all?” + 

Newton smiled, giving him greeting in downright Ridge style. + 

“Fine,” he said. “Glad to see you, Mr. Armitage.” + 

When he got indoors, Armitage threw off his coat. He and Peter had a drink together, and then he went to have a wash and brush up before dinner. Mrs. Newton came from the kitchen; she was pleased to see Mr. Armitage, she said, and he shook hands with her and made her feel that he was really quite delighted to see her. She spent a busy hour or so making the best of her preparations for the evening meal, so that he might repeat his usual little compliments about her cooking. Armitage had his dinner in a small private sitting-room, and strolled out afterwards to the veranda to smoke and yarn with the men. + 

He spent the evening with them there, and in the bar, hearing the news of the Ridge and gossiping genially. He had come all the way from Sydney the day before, spent the night in the train, and had no head for business that night, he said. When he yarned with them, Fallen Star men had a downright sense of liking John Armitage. He was a good sort, they told each other; they appreciated his way of talking, and laughed over the stories he told and the rare and racy Americanisms with which he flavoured his speech for their benefit. + 

When he exerted himself to entertain and amuse them, they were as pleased with him as a pack of women. And John Lincoln Armitage pleased women, men of the Ridge guessed, the women of his own kind as well as the women of Fallen Star who had talked to him now and then. His eyes had a mild caress when they rested on a woman; it was not in the least offensive, but carried challenge and appeal⁠—a suggestion of sympathy. He had a thousand little courtesies for women, the deference which comes naturally to “a man of the world” for a member of “the fair sex.” Mrs. Newton was always flattered and delighted after a talk with him. He asked her advice about opals he had bought or was going to buy, and, although he did not make use of it very often, she was always pleased by his manner of asking. Mrs. George Woods and Mrs. Archie Cross both confessed to a partiality for Mr. Armitage, and even Mrs. Watty agreed that he was “a real nice man”; and when he was in the township Mrs. Henty and one of the girls usually drove over from the station and took him back to Warria to stay a day or two before he went back to Sydney on his return journey to New York. + 

Armitage was very keen to know whether there had been any sensational finds on the Ridge during the year, and all about them. He wanted to know who had been getting good stuff, and said that he had bought Jun’s stones in Sydney. The men exclaimed at that. + 

“I was surprised to hear,” John Armitage said, “what happened to the other parcel. You don’t mean to say you think Charley Heathfield⁠—?” + 

“We ain’t tried him yet,” Watty remarked cautiously, “but the evidence is all against him.” + 

Rouminof thrust himself forward, eager to tell his story. Realising the proud position he might have been in this night with the opal-buyer if he had had his opals, tears gathered in his eyes as he went over it all again. + 

Armitage listened intently. + 

“Well, of all the rotten luck!” he exclaimed, when Paul had finished. “Have another whisky, Rouminof? But what I can’t make out,” he added, “is why, if he had the stones, Charley didn’t come to me with them.⁠ ⁠… I didn’t buy anything but Jun’s stuff before I came up here⁠ ⁠… and he just said it was half the find he was showing me. Nice bit of pattern in that big black piece, eh? If Charley had the stones, you’d think he’d ’ve come along to me, or got Jun, or somebody to come along for him.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I don’t know about that.” George Woods felt for his reasons. “He wouldn’t want you⁠—or anybody else to know he’d got them.” + 

“That’s right,” Watty agreed. + 

“He’s got them all right,” Ted Cross declared. “You see, I seen him taking Rummy home that night⁠—and he cleared out next morning.” + 

“I guess you boys know best.” John Armitage sipped his whisky thoughtfully. “But I’m mad to get the rest of the stones. Tell you the truth, the old man hasn’t been too pleased with my buying lately⁠ ⁠… and it would put him in no end of a good humour if I could take home with me another packet of gems like the one I got from Jun. Jun knew I was keen to get the stones⁠ ⁠… and I can’t help thinking⁠ ⁠… if he knew they were about, he’d put me in the way of getting them⁠ ⁠… or them in my way⁠—somehow. You don’t think⁠ ⁠… anybody else could have been on the job, and⁠ ⁠… put it over on Charley, say.⁠ ⁠…” + 

His eyes went over the faces of the men lounging against the bar, or standing in groups about him. Michael was lifting his glass to drink, and, for the fraction of a second the opal-buyer’s glance wavered on his face before it passed on. + 

“Not likely,” George Woods said dryly. + 

Recognising the disfavour his suggestion raised, Armitage brushed it aside. + 

“I don’t think so, of course,” he said. + 

And although he did not speak to him, or even look at him closely again, John Armitage was thinking all the evening of the quiver, slight as the tremor of a moth’s wing, on Michael’s face, when that inquiry had been thrown out. + 

XI + 

Armitage was busy going over parcels of stone and bargaining with the men for the greater part of the next day. He was beginning to have more of Dawe Armitage’s zest for the business; and, every time they met, Ridge men found him shrewder, keener. His manner was genial and easygoing with them; but there was a steel band in him somewhere, they were sure. + 

The old man had been bluff, and as hard as nails; but they understood him better than his son. John Armitage, they knew, was only perfunctorily interested opal-buying at first; he had gone into it to please the old man, but gradually the thing had taken hold of him. He was not yet, however, anything like as good a judge of opal, and his last buying on the Ridge had displeased his father considerably. John Armitage had bought several parcels of good-looking opal; but one stone, which had cost £50 in the rough, was not worth £5 when it was cut. A grain of sand, Dawe Armitage swore he could have seen a mile away, went through it, and it cracked on the wheel. A couple of parcels had brought double what had been paid for them; but several stones John had given a good price for were not worth half the amount, his father had said. + 

George Woods and Watty took John Armitage a couple of fine knobbies during the morning, and the Crosses had shown him a parcel containing two good green and blue stones with rippled lights; but they had more on the parcel than Armitage felt inclined to pay, remembering the stormy scene there had been with the old man over that last stone from Crosses’ mine which had cracked in the cutter’s hands. Towards the end of the day Mr. Armitage came to the conclusion, having gone over the stones the men brought him, and having bought all he fancied, that there was very little black opal of first quality about. He was meditating the fact, leaning back in his chair in the sitting-room Newton had reserved for him to see the gougers in, some pieces of opal, his scales and microscope on the table before him, when Michael knocked. + 

Absorbed in his reflections, realising there would be little to show for the trouble and pains of his long journey, and reviewing a slowly germinating scheme and dream for the better output of opal from Fallen Star, John Armitage did not at first pay any attention to the knock. + 

He had been thinking a good deal of Michael in connection with that scheme. Michael, he knew, would be his chief opponent, if ever he tried putting it into effect. When he had outlined his idea and vaguely formed plans to his father, Dawe Armitage would have nothing to do with them. He swept them aside uncompromisingly. + 

“You don’t know what you’re up against,” he said. “There isn’t a man on the Ridge wouldn’t fight like a polecat if you tried it on ’em. Give ’em a word of it⁠—and we quit partnership, see? They wouldn’t stand for it⁠—not for a second⁠—and there’d be no more black opal for Armitage and Son, if they got any idea on the Ridge you’d that sort of notion at the back of your head.” + 

But John Armitage refused to give up his idea. He went to it as a dog goes to a planted bone⁠—gnawed and chewed over it, contemplatively. + 

He had made this trip to Fallen Star with little result, and he was sure a system of working the mines on scientific, up-to-date lines would ensure the production of more stone. He wanted to talk organisation and efficiency to men of the Ridge, to point out to them that organisation and efficiency were of first value in production, not realising Ridge men considered their methods both organised and efficient within their means and for their purposes. + 

Michael knocked again, and Armitage called: + 

“Come in!” When he saw who had come into the room, he rose and greeted Michael warmly. + 

“Oh, it’s you, Michael!” he said, with a sense of guilt at the thoughts Michael had interrupted. “I wondered what on earth had become of you. The old man gave me no end of messages, and there are a couple of magazines for you in my grip.” + 

“Thank you, Mr. Armitage,” Michael replied. + 

“Well, I hope you’ve got some good stuff,” Armitage said. + 

Michael took the chair opposite to him on the other side of the table. “I haven’t got much,” he said. + 

“I remember Newton told me you’ve been having rotten luck.” + 

“It’s looked up lately,” Michael said, the flickering wisp of a smile in his eyes. “The boys say Rummy’s a luck-bringer.⁠ ⁠… He’s working with me now, and we’ve been getting some nice stone.” + 

He took a small packet of opal from his pocket and put it on the table. It was wrapped in newspaper. He unfastened the string, turned back the cotton-wool in which the pieces of opal were packed, and spread them out for Armitage to look at. + 

Armitage went over the stones. He put them, one by one, under his microscope, and held them to and from the light. + 

“That’s a nice bit of colour, Michael,” he said, admiring a small piece of grey potch with a black strain which flashed needling rays of green and gold. “A little bit more of that, and you’d be all right, eh?” + 

Michael nodded. “We’re on a streak now,” he said. “It ought to work out all right.” + 

“I hope it will.” Armitage held the piece of opal to the light and moved it slowly. “Rouminof’s working with you now⁠—and Potch, they tell me?” + 

Michael nodded. + 

“Pretty hard on him, Charley’s getting away with his stones like that!” + 

John Armitage probed the quiet eyes of the man before him with a swift glance. + 

“You’re right there, Mr. Armitage,” Michael said. “Harder on Paul than it would have been on anybody else. He’s got the fever pretty bad.” + 

Armitage laughed, handling a stone thoughtfully. + 

“I gave Jun a hundred pounds for his big stone. I’d give the same for the other⁠—if I could lay my hands on it, though the boys say it wasn’t quite as big, but better pattern.” + 

“That’s right,” Michael said. + 

Silence lay between them for a moment. + 

“What have you got on the lot, Michael?” Armitage asked, picking up the stones before him and going over them absentmindedly. + 

“A tenner,” Michael said. + 

Usually a gouger asked several pounds more than he expected to get. John Armitage knew that; Michael knew he knew it. Armitage played with the stones, hesitated as though his mind were not made up. There was not much more than potch and colour in the bundle. He went over the stones with the glass again. + 

“Oh well, Michael,” he said, “we’re old friends. I won’t haggle with you. Ten pounds⁠—your own valuation.” + 

He would get twice as much for the parcel, but the price was a good one. Michael was surprised he had conceded it so easily. + 

Armitage pulled out his chequebook and pushed a box of cigars across the table. Michael took out his pipe. + 

“If you don’t mind, Mr. Armitage,” he said, “I’m more at home with this.” + 

“Please yourself, Michael,” Armitage murmured, writing his cheque. + 

When Michael had put the cheque in his pocket, Armitage took a cigar, nipped and lighted it, and leaned back in his chair again. + 

“Not much big stuff about, Michael,” he remarked, conversationally. + 

“George Woods had some good stones,” Michael said. + 

Armitage was not enthusiastic. “Pretty fair. But the old man will be better pleased with the stuff I got from Jun Johnson than anything else this trip.⁠ ⁠… I’d give a good deal to get the almond-shaped stone in that other parcel.” + 

Michael realised Mr. Armitage had said the same thing to him before. He wondered why he had said it to him⁠—what he was driving at. + 

“There were several good stones in Paul’s parcel,” he said. + 

His clear, quiet eyes met John Armitage’s curious, inquiring gaze. He was vaguely discomfited by Armitage’s gaze, although he did not flinch from it. He wondered what Mr. Armitage knew, that he should look like that. + 

“It’s been hard on Rouminof,” Armitage murmured again. + 

Michael agreed. + 

“After the boys making Jun shell out, too! It doesn’t seem to have been much use, does it?” + 

“No,” Michael said. + 

“And they say he was going to take that girl of his down to Sydney to have her trained as a singer. She can sing, too. But her mother, Michael⁠—I heard her in Dinorah⁠ ⁠… when I was a little chap.” Enthusiasm lighted John Armitage’s face. “She was wonderful.⁠ ⁠… The old man says people were mad about her when she was in New York.⁠ ⁠… It was said, you know, she belonged to some aristocratic Russian family, and ran away with a rascally violinist⁠—Rouminof. Can you believe it?⁠ ⁠… Went on the stage to keep him.⁠ ⁠… But she couldn’t stand the life. Soon after she was lost sight of.⁠ ⁠… I’ve often wondered how she drifted to Fallen Star. But she liked being here, the old man says.” + 

Michael nodded. There was silence between them a moment; then Michael rose to go. The opal-buyer got up too, and flung out his arms, stretching with relief to be done with his day’s work. + 

“I’ve been cooped in here all day,” he said. “I’ll come along with you, Michael. I’d like to have a look at the Punti Rush. Can you walk over there with me?” + 

“ ’Course I can, Mr. Armitage,” Michael said heartily. + 

They walked out of the hotel and through the town towards the rush, where half a dozen new claims had been pegged a few weeks before. + 

Snowshoes passed then going out of the town to his hut, swinging along the track and gazing before him with the eyes of a seer, his fine old face set in a dream, serene dignity in every line of his erect and slowly-moving figure. + 

Armitage looked after him. + 

“What a great old chap he is, Michael,” he exclaimed. “You don’t know anything about him⁠ ⁠… who he is, or where he comes from, do you?” + 

“No,” Michael said. + 

“How does he live?” + 

“Noodles.” + 

“He’s never brought me any stone.” + 

“Trades it with the storekeepers⁠—though the boys do say”⁠—Michael looked with smiling eyes after Snowshoes⁠—“he may be a bit of a miser, loves opal more than the money it brings.” + 

Armitage’s interest deepened. “There are chaps like that. I’ve heard the old man talk about a stone getting hold of a man sometimes⁠—mesmerising him. I believe the old man’s a bit like that himself, you know. There are two or three pieces of opal he’s got from Fallen Star nothing on earth will induce him to part with. We wanted a stone for an Indian nabob’s show tiara⁠—something of that sort⁠—not long ago. I fancied that big knobby we got from George Woods; do you remember? But the old man wouldn’t part with it; not he! Said he’d see all the nabobs in the world in⁠—Hades, before they got that opal out of him!” + 

Michael laughed. The thought of hard-shelled old Dawe Armitage hoarding opals tickled him immensely. + 

“Fact,” Armitage continued. “He’s got a couple of stones he’s like a kid over⁠—takes them out, rubs them, and plays with them. And you should hear him if I try to get them from him.⁠ ⁠… A packet of crackers isn’t in it with the old man.” + 

“The boys’d like to hear that,” Michael said. + 

“There’s no doubt about the fascination the stuff exercises,” John Armitage went on. “You people say, once an opal-miner, always an opal-miner; but I say, once an opal-buyer, always an opal-buyer. I wasn’t keen about this business when I came into it⁠ ⁠… but it’s got me all right. I can’t see myself coming to this Godforsaken part of the world of yours for anything but black opal.⁠ ⁠…” + 

That expression, whimsical and enigmatic, which was never very far from them, had grown in Michael’s eyes. He began to sense a motive in Armitage’s seemingly casual talk, and to understand why the opal-buyer was so friendly. + 

“The old man tells a story,” Armitage continued, “of that robbery up at Blue Pigeon. You know the yarn I mean⁠ ⁠… about sticking up a coach when there was a good parcel of opal on board. Somebody did the bush-ranging trick and got away with the opal.⁠ ⁠… The thief was caught, and the stuff put for safety in an iron safe at the post office. And sight of the opals corrupted one of the men in the post office.⁠ ⁠… He was caught⁠ ⁠… and then a mounted trooper took charge of them. And the stuff bewitched him, too.⁠ ⁠… He tried to get away with it.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“That’s right,” Michael murmured serenely. + 

Armitage eyed him keenly. He could scarcely believe the story he had got from Jun, that the second parcel of stones had been exchanged after Charley got them, or that they had been changed on Paul before Charley got them from him. + 

Michael guessed Armitage was sounding him by talking so much of Rouminof’s stones and the robbery. He wondered what Armitage knew⁠—whether he knew anything which would attach him, Michael, to knowledge of what had become of Paul’s stones. There was always the chance that Charley had recognised some of the opal in the parcel substituted for Paul’s, although none of the scraps were significant enough to be remembered, Michael thought, and Charley was never keen enough to have taken any notice of the sun-flash and fragments of coloured potch they had taken out of the mine during the year. The brown knobby, which Michael had kept for something of a sentimental reason, because it was the first stone he had found on Fallen Star, Charley had never seen. + 

But, probably, he remarked to himself, Armitage was only trying to get information from him because he thought that Michael Brady was the most likely man on the Ridge to know what had become of the stones, or to guess what might have become of them. + 

As they walked and talked, these thoughts were an undercurrent in Michael’s mind. And the undercurrent of John Lincoln Armitage’s mind, through all his amiable and seemingly inconsequential gossip, was not whether Michael had taken the stones, but why he had, and what had become of them. + 

Armitage could not, at first, bring himself to credit the half-formed suspicion which that quiver of Michael’s face, when he had spoken of what Jun said, had given him. Yet they were all more or less mad, people who dealt with opal, he believed. It might not be for the sake of profit Michael had taken the stones, if he had taken them⁠—there was still a shadow of doubt in his mind. John Armitage knew that any man on the Ridge would have knocked him down for harbouring such a thought. Michael was the little father, the knight without fear and without a stain, of the Ridge. He reflected that Michael had never brought him much stone. His father had often talked of Michael Brady and the way he had stuck to gouging opal with precious little luck for many years. The parcel he had sold that day was perhaps the best Michael had traded with Armitage and Son for a long time. John Armitage wondered if any man could work so long without having found good stuff, without having realised the hopes which had materialised for so many other men of the Ridge. + 

They went over the new rush, inspected “prospects,” and yarned with Pony-Fence Inglewood and Bully Bryant, who had pegged out a claim there. But as Armitage and he walked back to the town discussing the outlook of the new field and the colour and potch some of the men already had to show, Michael found himself in the undertow of an uneasy imagination. He protested to himself that he was unnecessarily apprehensive, that all Armitage was trying to get from him was any information which would throw light on the disappearance of Paul’s stones. And Armitage was wondering whether Michael might not be an opal miser⁠—whether the mysterious fires of black opal might not have eaten into his brain as they had into the brains of good men before him. + 

If they had, and if he had found the flaw in Michael’s armour, John Armitage realised that the way to fulfilment of his schemes for buying the mines and working them on up-to-date lines, was opened up. If Michael could be proved unfaithful to the law and ideals of Ridge, John Armitage believed the men’s faith in the fabric of their common life would fall to pieces. He envisaged the eating of moths of doubt and disappointment into the philosophy of the Ridge, the disintegration of ideas which had held the men together, and made them stand together in matters of common interest and service, as one man. He had almost assured himself that if Michael was not the thief and hoarder of the lost opals, he at least knew something of them, when a ripple of laughter and gust of singing were flung into the air not far from them. + 

To Armitage it was as though some blithe spirit was mocking the discovery he thought he had made, and the fruition it promised those secret hopes of his. + 

“It’s Sophie,” Michael said. + 

They had come across the Ridge to the back of the huts. The light was failing; the sky, from the earth upwards where the sunset had been, the frail, limpid green of a shallow lagoon, deepening to blue, darker than indigo. The crescent of a moon, faintly gilded, swung in the sky above the dark shapes of the huts which stood by the track to the old Flash-in-the-pan rush. The smoke of sandalwood fires burning in the huts was in the air. A goat bell tinkled.⁠ ⁠… + 

Potch and Sophie were talking behind the hut somewhere; their exclamations, laughter, a phrase or two of the song Sophie was singing went through the quietness. + 

And it was all this he wanted to change! John Armitage caught the revelation of the moment as he stood to listen to Sophie singing. He understood as he had never done what the Ridge stood for⁠—association of people with the earth, their attachment to the primary needs of life, the joyous flight of youthful spirits, this quiet happiness and peace at evening when the work of the day was done. + 

As he came from the dumps, having said good night to Michael, he saw Sophie, a slight, girlish figure, on the track ahead of him. Her dress flickered and flashed through the trees beside the track; it was a wraithlike streak in the twilight. She was taking the milk down to Newton’s, and singing to herself as she walked. John Armitage quickened his steps to overtake her. + 

XII + 

The visit of an opal-buyer ruffled ever so slightly the still surface of life on the Ridge. When Armitage had gone, he was talked of for a few days; the stones he had bought, the prices he had given for them, were discussed. Some of his sayings, and the stories he had told, were laughed over. Tricks of speech he had used, tried at first half in fun, were adopted and dropped into the vernacular of the mines. + 

“Sure!” the men said as easily as an American; and sometimes, talking with each other: “You’ve got another think coming to you”; or, “See, you’ve got your nerve with you!” + 

For a night or two Michael went over the books and papers John Armitage had brought him. At first he just glanced here and there through them, and then he began to read systematically, and light glimmered in his windows far into the night. He soaked the contents of two or three reviews and several newspapers before giving himself to a book on international finance in which old Armitage had written his name. + 

Michael thrilled to the stimulus of the book, the intellectual excitement of the ideas it brought forth. He lived tumultuously within the four bare walls of his room, arguing with himself, the author, the world at large. Wrong and injustice enthroned, he saw in this book describing the complexities of national and international systems of finance, the subtle weaving and interweaving of webs of the moneymakers. + 

This was not the effect Dawe Armitage had expected his book to have; he had expected to overawe and daze Michael with its impressive arraignment of figures and its subtle and bewildering generalisations on credit and foreign exchange. Michael’s mind had cut through the fog raised by the financier’s jargon to the few small facts beneath it all. Neither dazed nor dazzled, his brain had swung true to the magnetic meridian of his faith. Far from the book having shown him the folly and futility of any attempt against the Money Power, as Dawe Armitage, in a moment of freakish humour had imagined it might, it had filled him with such an intensity of fury that for a moment he believed he alone could accomplish the regeneration of the world; that like St. Michael of old he would go forth and slay the dragon, this chimera which was ravaging the world, drawing the blood, beauty, and joy of youth, the peace and wisdom of age; breaking manhood and womanhood with its merciless claws. + 

But falling back on a consciousness of self, as with broken wings he realised he was neither archangel, nor superman, but Michael Brady, an ordinary, ill-educated man who read and dreamed a great deal, and gouged for black opal on Fallen Star Ridge. He was a little bitter, and more humble, for having entertained that radiant vision of himself. + 

John Armitage had been gone from the Ridge some weeks when Michael went over in his mind every phase and phrase of the talk they had had. His lips took a slight smile; it crept into his eyes, as he reviewed what he had said and what John Armitage had said, smoking unconsciously. + 

Absorbed in his reading, he had thought little of John Armitage and that walk to the new rush with him. Occasionally the memory of it had nickered and glanced through his mind; but he was so obsessed by the ideas this new reading had stirred, that he went about his everyday jobs in the mine and in the hut, absentmindedly, automatically, because they were things he was in the habit of doing. Potch watched him anxiously; Rouminof growled to him; Sophie laughed and flitted and sang, before his eyes; but Michael had been only distantly conscious of what was going on about him. George Woods and Watty guessed what was the matter; they knew the symptoms of these reading and brooding bouts Michael was subject to. The moods wore off when they put questions likely to draw information and he began to talk out and discuss what he had been reading with them. + 

He had talked this one off, when suddenly he remembered how John Armitage’s eyes had dived into his during that walk to the new rush. He could see Armitage’s eyes again, keen grey eyes they were. And his hands. Michael remembered how Armitage’s hands had played over the opals he had taken to show him. John Lincoln Armitage had the shrewd eyes of any man who lives by his wits⁠—lawyer, pickpocket, politician, or financier⁠—he decided; and the fine white hands of a woman. Only Michael did not know any woman whose hands were as finely shaped and as white as John Armitage’s. Images of his clean-shaven, hothouse face of a city dweller, slightly burned by his long journey on land and sea, recurred to him; expressions, gestures, inflections of voice. + 

Michael smiled to himself in communion with his thoughts as he went over the substance of Armitage’s conversation, dissecting and shredding it critically. The more he thought of what Armitage had said, the more he found himself believing John Armitage had some information which caused him to think that he, Michael, knew something of the whereabouts of the stones. He could not convince himself Armitage believed he actually held the stones, or that he had stolen them. Armitage had certainly given him an opportunity to sell on the quiet if he had the stones; but his manner was too tentative, mingled with a subtle respect, to carry the notion of an overt suggestion of the sort, or the possession of incriminating knowledge. Then there was the story of the old Cliffs robbery. Michael wondered why Mr. Armitage had gone over that. On general principles, doubting the truth of his long run of bad luck⁠—or from curiosity merely, perhaps. But Michael did not deceive himself that Armitage might have told the story in order to discover whether there was something of the miser in him, and whether⁠—if Michael had anything to do with the taking of Paul’s opals⁠—he might prefer to hold rather than sell them. + 

Michael was amused at the thought of himself as a miser. He went into the matter as honestly as he could. He knew the power opal had with him, the fascination of the search for it, which had brought him from the Cliffs to the Ridge, and which had held him to the place, although the life and ideas it had come to represent meant more to him now than black opal. Still, he was an opal miner, and through all his lean years on the Ridge he had been upheld by the thought of the stone he would find some day. + 

He had dreamed of that stone. It had haunted his idle thoughts for years. He had seen it in the dark of the mine, deep in the ruddy earth, a mirror of jet with fires swarming, red, green, and gold in it. + 

Dreams of the great opal he would one day discover had comforted him when storekeepers were asking for settlement of long-standing accounts. He did not altogether believe he would find it, that wonderful piece of black opal; but he dreamed, like a child, of finding it. + 

As he thought of it, and of John Armitage, the smile in his eyes broadened. If Armitage knew of that stone of his dreams, he would certainly think his surmise was correct and believe that Michael Brady was a miser. But he had held the dream in a dark and distant corner of his consciousness; had it out to mood and brood over only at rare and distant intervals; and no one was aware of its existence. + 

Black opal had no more passionate lover than himself, Michael knew. He trembled with instinctive eagerness, reverence, and delight, when he saw a piece of beautiful stone; his eyes devoured it. But there was nothing personal in his love. He might have been high priest of some mysterious divinity; when she revealed herself he was consumed with adoration. In a vague, whimsical way Michael realised this of himself, and yet, too, that if ever he held the stone of his dreams in his hands, he would be filled with a glorious and flooding sense of accomplishment; an ecstasy would transport him. It would be beyond all value in money, that stone; but he would not want to keep it to gaze on alone, he would want to give it to the world as a thing of consummate beauty, for everybody to enjoy the sight of and adore. + 

No, Michael assured himself, he was not a miser. And, he reflected, he had not even looked at Paul’s stones. For all he knew, the stones Paul had been showing that night at Newton’s might have been removed from the box before he left Newton’s. Someone might have done to Paul what he, Michael, had done to Charley Heathfield, as Armitage had suggested. Paul’s little tin box was well enough known. He had been opening and showing his stones at Newton’s a long time before the night when Jun had been induced to divide spoils. It would be just as well, Michael decided, to see what the box did contain; and he promised himself that he would open it and look over the stones⁠—some evening. But he was not inclined to hurry the engagement with himself to do so. + 

He had been glad enough to forget that he had anything to do with that box of Paul’s: it still lay among the books where he had thrown it. The memory of the night on which he had seen Charley taking Paul home, and of all that had happened afterwards, was blurred in an ugly vision for him. It had become like the memory of a nightmare. He could scarcely believe he had done what he had done; yet he knew he had. He drew a deep breath of relief when he realised everything had worked out well so far. + 

Paul was working with him; they had won that little bit of luck to carry them on; Sophie was growing up healthily, happily, on the Ridge. She was growing so quickly, too. Within the last few months Michael had noticed a subtle change in her. There was an indefinable air of a flower approaching its bloom about her. People were beginning to talk of her looks. Michael had seen eyes following her admiringly. Sophie walked with a light, lithe grace; she was slight and straight, not tall really, but she looked tall in the black dress she still wore and which came to her ankles. There was less of the eager sprite about her, a suggestion of some sobering experience in her eyes⁠—the shadow of her mother’s death⁠—which had banished her unthinking and careless childhood. But the eyes still had the purity and radiance of a child’s. And she seemed happy⁠—the happiest thing on the Ridge, Michael thought. The cadence of her laughter and a ripple of her singing were never long out of the air about her father’s hut. Wherever she went, people said now: “Sing to us, Sophie!” + 

And she sang, whenever she was asked, without the slightest self-consciousness, and always those songs from old operas, or some of the folk-songs her mother had taught her, which were the only songs she knew. + 

Michael had seen a number of neighbours in the township and their wives and children sitting round in one or other of their homes while Sophie sang. He had seen a glow of pleasure transfuse people as they listened to her pure and ringing notes. Singing, Sophie seemed actually to diffuse happiness, her own joy in the melodies she flung into the air. Oh, yes, Sophie was happy singing, Michael could permit himself to believe now. She could make people happy by her singing. He had feared her singing as a will-o’-the-wisp which would lead her away from him and the Ridge. But when he heard her enthralling people in the huts with it, he was not afraid. + 

Paul sometimes moaned about the chances she was missing, and that she could be singing in theatres to great audiences. Sophie herself laughed at him. She was quite content with the Ridge, it seemed, and to sing to people on their verandas in the summer evenings or round the fires in the winter. She might have had greater and finer audiences, the Ridge folk said, but she could not have had more appreciative ones. + 

If she was singing in the town, Michael always went to bring her home, and he was as pleased as Sophie to hear people say: + 

“You’re not taking her away yet, Michael? The night’s a pup!” or, “Another⁠ ⁠… just one more song, Sophie!” + 

And if she had been singing at Newton’s, Michael liked to see the men come to the door of the bar, holding up their glasses, and to hear their call, as Sophie and he went down the road: + 

“Sophie! Sophie!” + 

“Skin off y’r nose!” + 

“All the luck!” + 

“Best respecks, Sophie!” + 

When Sophie did not know what to do with herself all the hours Michael and Potch and her father were away at the mines, Michael had showed her how to use her mother’s cutting-wheel. He taught her all he knew of opals, and Sophie was delighted with the idea of learning to cut and polish gems as her mother had. + 

Michael gave her rough stones to practise on, and in no time she learnt to handle them skilfully. George, Watty, and the Crosses brought her some gems to face and polish for them, and they were so pleased with her work that they promised to give her most of their stones to cut and polish. She had two or three accidents, and was very crestfallen about them; but Michael declared they were part of the education of an opal-cutter and would teach her more about her work than anyone could tell her. + 

To Michael those days were of infinite blessedness. They proved again and again the right of what he had done. At first he was vaguely alarmed and uneasy when he saw younger men of the Ridge, Roy O’Mara or Bully Bryant, talking or walking with Sophie, or he saw her laughing and talking with them. There was something about Sophie’s bearing with them which disturbed him⁠—a subtle, unconscious witchery. Then he explained it to himself. He guessed that the woman in her was waking, or awake. On second thoughts he was not jealous or uneasy. It was natural enough the boys should like Sophie, that she should like them; he recognised the age-old call of sex in it all. And if Sophie loved and married a man of the Ridge, the future would be clear, Michael thought. He could give Paul the opals, and her husband could watch over Sophie and see no harm came to her if she left the Ridge. + 

The uneasiness stirred again, though, one afternoon when he found her walking from the tank paddock with Arthur Henty beside her. There was a startled consciousness about them both when Michael joined them and walked along the road with them. He had seen Sophie talking to Henty in and about the township before, but it had not occurred to him there was anything unusual about that. Sophie had gone about as she liked and talked to whom she liked since she was a child. She was on good terms with everyone in the countryside. No one knew where she went or what she did in the long day while the men were at the mines. Because the carillon of her laughter flew through those quiet days, Michael instinctively had put up a prayer of thanksgiving. Sophie was happy, he thought. He did not ask himself why; he was grateful; but a vague disquiet made itself felt when he remembered how he had found her walking with Arthur Henty, and the number of times he had seen her talking to Arthur Henty at Chassy Robb’s store, or on the tracks near the town. + 

Fallen Star folk knew Arthur better than any of the Hentys. For years he had been coming through the township with cattle or sheep, and had put up at Newton’s with stockmen on his way home, or when he was going to an outstation beyond the Ridge. + 

His father, James Henty, had taken up land in the back-country long before opal was found on Fallen Star Ridge. He had worked half a million square acres on an arm of the Darling in the days before runs were fenced, with only a few black shepherds and one white man, old Bill M’Gaffy, to help him for the first year or two. But, after an era of extraordinary prosperity, a series of droughts and misfortunes had overwhelmed the station and thrown it on the tender mercies of the banks. + 

The Hentys lived much as they had always done. They entertained as usual, and there was no hint of a wolf near the door in the hearty, good-natured, and liberal hospitality of the homestead. A constitutional optimism enabled James Henty to believe Warria would ultimately throw off its debts and the good old days return. Only at the end of a season, when year after year he found there was no likelihood of being able to meet even the yearly interest on mortgages, did he lose some of his sanguine belief in the station’s ability to right itself, and become irritable beyond endurance, blaming any and everyone within hail for the unsatisfactory estimates. + 

But usually Arthur bore the brunt of these outbursts. Arthur Henty had gone from school to work on the station at the beginning of Warria’s decline from the years of plenty, and had borne the burden and not a little of the blame for heavy losses during the droughts, without ever attempting to shift or deny the responsibilities his father put upon him. + 

“It does the old man good to have somebody to go off at,” he explained indifferently to his sister, Elizabeth, when she called him all the fools under the sun for taking so much blackguarding sitting down. + 

Although James Henty’s only son and manager of the station under his father’s autocratic rule, Arthur Henty lived and worked among Warria stockmen as though he were one of them. His clothes were as worn and heavy with dust as theirs; his hat was as weathered, his hands as hard⁠—sunburnt and broken with sores when barcoo was in the air. A quiet, unassuming man, he never came the “Boss” over them. He passed on the old man’s orders, and, for the rest, worked as hard as any man on the station. + 

He had never done anything remarkable that anyone could remember; but the men he worked with liked him. Everybody rather liked Arthur Henty, although nobody enthused about him. He had done man’s work ever since he was a boy, with no more than a couple of years’ schooling; he had done it steadily and as well as any other young man in the back-country. But there was a curious, almost feminine weakness in him somewhere. The men did not understand it. They thought he was too supine with his father; that he ought to stand up to him more. + 

Arthur Henty preferred being out on the plains with them rather than in at the home station, the men said. He looked happier when he was with them; he whistled to them as they lay yarning round the campfire before turning in. They had never heard anything like his whistling. He seemed to be playing some small, fine, invisible flute as he gave them old-fashioned airs, ragtime tunes, songs from the comic operas, and miscellaneous melodies he had heard his sisters singing. No one had heard him whistling like that at the station. Out on the plains, or in the bar at Newton’s, he was a different man. Once or twice when he had been drinking, and a glass or two of beer or whisky had got to his head, he had shown more the spirit that it was thought he possessed⁠—as if, when the conscious will was relaxed, a submerged self had leapt forth. + 

Men who had known him a long time wondered whether time would not strengthen the fibres of that submerged self; but they had seen Arthur Henty lose the elastic, hopeful outlook of youth, and sink gradually into the place assigned him by his father, at first dutifully, then with an indifference which slowly became apathy. + 

Mrs. Henty and the girls exclaimed with dismay and disgust when they returned to the station after two years in town, and saw how rough and unkempt-looking Arthur had become. They insisted on his having his hair and beard cut at once, and that he should manicure his fingernails. After he had dressed for dinner and was clipped and shaved, they said he looked more as if he belonged to them; but he was a shy, awkward boor, and they did not know what to make of him. In his mother’s hands, Arthur was still a child, though, and she brought him back to the fold of the family, drew his resistance⁠—an odd, sullen resentment he had acquired for the niceties of what she called “civilised society”⁠—and made him amenable to its discipline. + 

Elizabeth was twice the man her brother was, James Henty was fond of declaring. She had all the vigour and dash he would have liked his son to possess. “My daughter Elizabeth,” he said as frequently as possible, and was always talking of her feats with horses, and the clearheaded and clever way she went about doing things, and getting her own way on all and every occasion. + 

When the men rounded buck-jumpers into the yards on a Sunday morning, Elizabeth would ride any Chris Este, the head stockman, let her near; but Arthur never attempted to ride any of the warrigals. He steered clear of horse-breaking and rough horses whenever he could, although he broke and handled his own horses. In a curious way he shared a secret feeling of his mother’s for horses. She had never been able to overcome an indefinable apprehension of the raw, half-broken horses of the back-country, although her nerve had carried her through years of acquaintance with them, innumerable accidents and misadventures, and hundreds of miles of journeys at their mercy; and Arthur, although he had lived and worked among horses as long as he could remember, had not been able to lose something of the same feeling. His sister, suspecting it, was frankly contemptuous; so was his father. It was the reason of Henty’s low estimate of his son’s character generally. And the rumour that Arthur Henty was shy of tough propositions in horses⁠—“afraid of horses”⁠—had a good deal to do with the never more than lukewarm respect men of the station and countryside had for him. + 

XIII + 

Sophie often met Arthur Henty on the road just out of the town. Usually it was going to or coming from the tank paddock, or in the paddock, on Friday afternoons, when he had been into Budda for the sales or to truck sheep or cattle. They did not arrange to meet, but Sophie expected to see Arthur when she went to the tank paddock, and she knew he expected to find her there. She did not know why she liked being with Arthur Henty so much, or why they were such golden occasions when she met him. They did not talk much when they were together. Their eyes met; they knew each other through their eyes⁠—a something remote from themselves was always working through their eyes. It drew them together. + 

When she was with Arthur Henty, Sophie knew she was filled with an ineffable gaiety, a thing so delicate and ethereal that as she sang she seemed to be filling the air with it. And Henty looked at her sometimes as if he had discovered a new, strange, and beautiful creature, a butterfly, or gnat, with gauzy, resplendent wings, whose beauty he was bewildered and overcome by. The last time they had been together he had longed to draw her to him and kiss her so that the virgin innocence would leave her eyes; but fear or some conscientious scruple had restrained him. He had been reluctant to awaken her, to change the quality of her feeling towards him. He had let her go with a lingering handclasp. In all their tender intimacy there had been no more of the lovemaking of the flesh than the subtle interweavings of instincts and fibres which this handclasp gave. Ridge folk had seen them walking together. They had seen that subtle inclination of Sophie’s and Arthur’s figures towards each other as they walked⁠—the magnetic, gentle, irresistible swaying towards each other⁠—and the gossips began to whisper and nod smilingly when they came across Arthur and Sophie on the road. Sophie at first went her way unconscious of the whispers and smiles. Then words were dropped slyly⁠—people teased her about Arthur. She realised they thought he was her sweetheart. Was he? She began to wonder and think about it. He must be; she came to the conclusion happily. Only sweethearts went for walks together as she and Arthur did. + 

“My mother says,” Mirry Flail remarked one day, “she wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see you marrying Arthur Henty, Sophie, and going over to live at Warria.” + 

“Goodness!” Sophie exclaimed, surprised and delighted that anybody should think such a thing. + 

“Marry Arthur Henty and go over and live at Warria.” Her mind, like a delighted little beaver, began to build on the idea. It did not alter her bearing with Arthur. She was less shy and thoughtful with him, perhaps; but he did not notice it, and she was carelessly and childishly content to have found the meaning of why she and Arthur liked meeting and talking together. People only felt as she and Arthur felt about each other if they were going to marry and live “happy ever after,” she supposed. + 

When Michael was aware of what was being said, and of the foundation there was for gossip, he was considerably disturbed. He went to talk to Maggie Grant about it. She, he thought, would know more of what was in the wind than he did, and be better able to gauge what the consequences were likely to be to Sophie. + 

“I’ve been bothered about it myself, Michael,” she said. “But neither you nor me can live Sophie’s life for her.⁠ ⁠… I don’t see we can do anything. His crowd’ll do all the interfering, if I know anything about them.” + 

“I suppose so,” Michael agreed. + 

“And, as far as I can see, it won’t do any good our butting in,” Mrs. Grant continued. “You know Sophie’s got a will of her own⁠ ⁠… and she’s always had a good deal her own way. I’ve talked round the thing to her⁠ ⁠… and I think she understands.” + 

“You’ve always been real good to her, Maggie,” Michael said gratefully. + 

“As to that”⁠—the lines of Maggie Grant’s broad, plain face rucked to the strength of her feeling⁠—“I’ve done what I could. But then, I’m fond of her⁠—fond of her as you are, Michael. That’s saying a lot. And you know what I thought of her mother. But it’s no use us thinking we can buy Sophie’s experience for her. She’s got to live⁠ ⁠… and she’s got to suffer.” + 

Busy with her opal-cutting, and happy with her thoughts, Sophie had no idea of the misgiving Michael and Maggie Grant had on her account, or that anyone was disturbed and unhappy because of her happiness. She sang as she worked. The whirr of her wheel, the chirr of sandstone and potch as they sheared away, made a small, busy noise, like the drone of an insect, in her house all day; and every day some of the men brought her stones to face and fix up. She had acquired such a reputation for making the most of stones committed to her care that men came from the Three Mile and from the Punti with opals for her to rough-out and polish. + 

Bully Bryant and Roy O’Mara were often at Rouminof’s in the evening, and they heard about it when they looked in at Newton’s later on, now and then. + 

“You must be striking it pretty good down at the Punti, Bull,” Watty Frost ventured genially one night. “See you takin’ stones for Sophie to fix up pretty near every evenin’.” + 

“There’s some as sees too much,” Bully remarked significantly. + 

“What you say, you say y’rself, Bull.” Watty pulled thoughtfully on his pipe, but his little blue eyes squinted over his fat, red-grained cheeks, not in the least abashed. + 

“I do,” Bull affirmed. “And them as sees too much⁠ ⁠… won’t see much⁠ ⁠… when I’m through with ’em.” + 

“Mmm,” Watty brooded. “That’s a good thing to know, isn’t it?” + 

He and the rest of the men continued to “sling off,” as they said, at Bully and Roy O’Mara as they saw fit, nevertheless. + 

The summer had been a mild one; it passed almost without a ripple of excitement. There were several hot days, but cool changes blew over, and the rains came before people had given up dreading the heat. Several new prospects had been made, and there were expectations that holes sunk on claims to the north of the Punti Rush would mean the opening up of a new field. + 

Michael and Potch worked on in their old claim with very little to show for their pains. Paul had slackened and lost interest as soon as the fitful gleams of opal they were on had cut out. Michael was not the man to manage Rummy, the men said. + 

Potch and Michael, however, seemed satisfied enough to regard Paul more or less as a sleeping partner; to do the work of the mine and share with him for keeping out of the way. + 

“Shouldn’t wonder if they wouldn’t rather have his room than his company,” Watty ventured, “and they just go shares with him so as things’ll be all right for Sophie.” + 

“That’s right!” Pony-Fence agreed. + 

The year had made a great difference to Potch. Doing man’s work, going about on equal terms with the men, the change of status from being a youth at anybody’s beck and call to doing work which entitled him to the taken-for-granted dignity of being an independent individual, had made a man of him. His frame had thickened and hardened. He looked years older than he was really, and took being Michael’s mate very seriously. + 

Michael had put up a shelter for himself and his mates, thinking that Potch and Paul might not be welcome in George and Watty’s shelter; but George and Watty were loth to lose Michael’s word from their councils. They called him over nearly every day, on one pretext or another. Sometimes his mates followed Michael. But Rouminof soon wearied of a discussion on anything except opal, and wandered off to the other shelters to discover whether anybody had struck anything good that morning. Potch threw himself on the ground beside Michael when Michael had invited him to go across to George and Watty’s shelter with him, and after a while the men did not notice him there any more than Michael’s shadow. He lay beside Michael, quite still, throwing crumbs to the birds which came round the shelter, and did not seem to be listening to what was said. But always when a man was heatedly and with some difficulty trying to disentangle his mind on a subject of argument, he found Potch’s eyes on him, steady and absorbing, and knew from their intent expression that Potch was following all he had to say with quick, grave interest. + 

Some people were staying at Warria during the winter, and when there was going to be a dance at the station Mrs. Henty wrote to ask Rouminof to play for it. She could manage the piano music, she said, and if he would tune his violin for the occasion, they would have a splendid band for the young people. And, her letter had continued: “We should be so pleased if your daughter would come with you.” + 

Sophie was wildly excited at the invitation. She had been to Ridge race balls for the last two or three years, but she had never even seen Warria. Her father had played at a Warria ball once, years before, when she was little; but she and her mother had not gone with him to the station. She remembered quite well when he came home, how he had told them of all the wonderful things there had been to eat at the ball⁠—stuffed chickens and crystallised fruit, iced cakes, and all manner of sweets. + 

Sophie had heard of the Warria homestead since she was a child, of its orange garden and great, cool rooms. It had loomed like the enchanted castle of a legend through all her youthful imaginings. And now, as she remembered what Mirry Flail had said, she was filled with delight and excitement at the thought of seeing it. + 

She wondered whether Arthur had asked his mother to invite her to the dance. She thought he must have; and with naive conceit imagined happily that Arthur’s mother must want to know her because she knew that Arthur liked her. And Arthur’s sisters⁠—it would be nice to know them and to talk to them. She went over and over in her mind the talks she would have with Polly and Nina, and perhaps Elizabeth Henty, some day. + 

A few weeks before the ball she had seen Arthur riding through the township with his sisters and a girl who was staying at Warria. He had not seen her, and Sophie was glad, because suddenly she had felt shy and confused at the thought of talking to him before a lot of people. Besides, they all looked so jolly, and were having such a good time, that she would not have known what to say to Arthur, or to his sisters, just then. + 

When she told Mrs. Woods and Martha M’Cready about the invitation, they smiled and teased her. + 

“Oh, that tells a tale!” they said. + 

Sophie laughed. She felt silly, and she was blushing, they said. But she was very happy at having been asked to the ball. For weeks before she found herself singing “Caro Nome” as she sat at work, went about the house, or with Potch after the goats in the late afternoon. + 

Arthur liked that song better than any other, and its melody had become mingled and interwoven with all her thoughts of him. + 

The twilight was deepening, on the evening a few days before the dance, when Bully Bryant and Roy O’Mara came up to Rouminof’s hut, calling Sophie. She was washing milk tins and tea dishes, and went to the door singing to herself, a candle throwing a fluttering light before her. + 

“Your father sent us along for you, Sophie,” Bully explained. “There’s a bit of a celebration on at Newton’s tonight, and the boys want you to sing for them.” + 

Sophie turned from them, going into the house to put down her candle. + 

“All right,” she said, pleased at the idea. + 

Michael came into the hut through, the back door. From his own room he had heard Bully calling and then explaining why he and Roy O’Mara were there. + 

“Don’t go, Sophie,” Michael said. + 

“But why, Michael?” Disappointment clouded Sophie’s first bright pleasure that the men had sent for her to sing to them, and her eagerness to do as they asked. + 

“It’s not right⁠ ⁠… not good for you to sing down there when the boys ’ve been drinking,” Michael said, unable to express clearly his opposition to her singing at Newton’s. + 

“Don’t be a spoilsport, Michael,” the boys at the door called when they saw he was trying to dissuade Sophie. + 

“Come along, Sophie,” Roy called. + 

She looked from Bully and Roy to Michael, hesitating. Theirs was the call of youth to youth, of youth to gaiety and adventure. She turned away from Michael. + 

“I’m going, Michael,” she said quickly, and swung to the door. Michael heard her laughing as she went off along the track with Bully and Roy. + 

“Did you know Mr. Armitage is up?” Roy stopped to call back. + 

“No,” Michael said. + 

“Came up by the coach this evening,” Roy said, and ran after Bully and Sophie. + 

It was a rowdy night at Newton’s. Shearing was just over at Warria sheds, and men with cheques to burn were crowding the bar and passages. Sophie was hailed with cheers as she neared the veranda. Her father staggered out towards her, waving his arms crazily. Sophie was surprised when she found the crowd waiting for her. There were so many strangers in it⁠—rough men with heavy, inflamed faces⁠—hardly one she knew among them. A murmur and boisterous clamour of voices came from the bar. The men on the veranda made way for her. + 

Her heart quailed when she looked into the big earthen-floored bar, and saw its crowd of rough-haired, sun-red men, still wearing the clothes they had been working in, grey flannel shirts and dungarees, blood-splashed, grimy, and greasy with the “yolk” of fleeces they had been handling. The smell of sheep and the sweat of long days of shearing and struggling with restless beasts were in the air, with fumes of rank tobacco and the flat, stale smell of beer. The hanging lamp over the bar threw only a dim light through the fog of smoke the men had put up, and which from the doorway completely obscured Peter Newton where he stood behind the bar. + 

Sophie hung back. + 

“I’m not going in there,” she said. + 

“Did you know Mr. Armitage was up?” Roy asked. + 

“No,” she said. + 

He explained how Mr. Armitage had come unexpectedly by the coach that evening. Sophie saw him among the men on the veranda. + 

“I’ll sing here,” she told Bully and Roy, leaning against a veranda post. + 

She was a little afraid. But she knew she had always pleased Ridge folk when she sang to them, so she put back her head and sang a song of youth and youthful happiness she had sung on the veranda at Newton’s before. It did not matter that the words were in Italian, which nobody understood. The dancing joyousness and laughing music of her notes carried the men with them. The applause was noisy and enthusiastic. Sophie laughed, delighted, yet almost afraid of her success. + 

Big and broad-shouldered, Bully Bryant stood at a little distance from her, in front of everybody. Arthur Henty, leaning against the wall near the door of the bar, smiled softly, foolishly, when she glanced at him. He had been drinking, too, and was watching, and listening to her, with the same look in his eyes as Bully. + 

Sophie caught the excitement about her. An exhilaration of pleasure thrilled her. It was crude wine which went to her head, this admiration and applause of strangers and of the men she had known since she was a child. There was a wonderful elation in having them beg her to sing. They looked actually hungry to hear her. She found Arthur Henty’s eyes resting on her with the expression she knew in them. An imp of recklessness entered her. Her father beat the air as if he were leading an orchestra, and she threw herself into the Shadow Song, singing with an abandonment that carried her beyond consciousness of her surroundings. + 

She sang again and again, and always in response to an eager tumult of cheers, thudding of feet, joggling of glasses, chorus of broken cries: “Encore, encore, Sophie!” An instinct of mischief and coquetry urging, she glanced sometimes at Arthur, sometimes at Bully. Then with a glance at Arthur, and for a last number, she began “Caro Nome,” and gave to her singing all the glamour and tenderness, the wild sweetness, the aria had come to have for her, because she had sung it so often to Arthur when they met and were walking along the road together. She was so carried away by her singing, she did not realise what had happened until afterwards. + 

She only knew that suddenly, roughly, she was grasped and lifted. She saw Bully’s face flaming before her own, gazed with terror and horror into his eyes. His face was thrown against hers⁠—and obliterated. + 

“Are you all right?” someone asked after a moment. + 

Awaking from the daze and bewilderment, Sophie looked up. + 

John Armitage was standing beside her; Potch nearby. They were on the outskirts of the crowd on the veranda. + 

“Yes,” she said. + 

The men on the veranda had broken into two parties; one was surging towards the bar door, the other moving off down the road out of the town. Michael came towards her. + 

“Thank you, Mr. Armitage,” he said. + 

“Oh, Potch looked after her. I couldn’t get near,” John Armitage said. + 

An extraordinary quiet took possession of Sophie. When she was going down the road with Potch and Michael, she said: + 

“Did Bully kiss me, Michael?” + 

“Yes,” he replied. + 

“I don’t know what happened then?” + 

“Arthur Henty knocked him down,” Michael said. + 

She looked at him with scared eyes. + 

“They want to fight it out⁠ ⁠… but they’re both drunk. The boys are trying to stop it.” + 

“Oh, Michael!” Sophie cried on a little gasping breath; and looking into her eyes he read her contrition, asking forgiveness, understanding all that he had not been able to explain to her. She did not say, “I’ll never sing there, like that, any more.” Her feeling was too deep for words; but Michael knew she never would. + 

XIV + 

“It’s what I wore, meself, white muslin, when I went to me first ball,” Mrs. George Woods said, standing off to admire the frock of white muslin Sophie had on, and which she had just fastened up for her. + 

Sophie was admiring her reflection in Mrs. Woods’ mirror, a square of glass which gave no more than her head and shoulders in brilliant sketchy outlines. She moved, trying to see more of herself and the new dress. Maggie Grant, who had helped with the making of the dress, was also gazing at her and at it admiringly. + 

When it was a question of Sophie having a dress for the ball at Warria, Mrs. Grant had spoken to Michael about it. + 

“Sophie’s got to have a decent dress to go to the station, Michael,” she said. “I’m not going to have people over there laughing at her, and she’s had nothing but her mother’s old dresses, cut down⁠—for goodness knows how long.” + 

“Will you get it?” Michael inquired anxiously. + 

Mrs. Grant nodded. + 

“Bessie Woods and I were thinking it might be pinspot muslin, with a bit of lace on it,” she said. “We could get the stuff at Chassy Robb’s and make it up between us.” + 

“Right!” Michael replied, looking immensely relieved to have the difficulty disposed of. “Tell Chassy to put it on my book.” + 

So the pinspot muslin and some cheap creamy lace had been bought. Mrs. Woods and Sophie settled on a style they found illustrating an advertisement in a newspaper and which resembled a dress one of the Henty girls had worn at the race ball the year before. Maggie Grant had done all the plain sewing and Mrs. Woods the fixing and finishing touches. They had consulted over and over again about sleeves and the length of the skirt. The frock had been fitted at least a dozen times. They had wondered where they would put the lace as a bit of trimming, and had decided for frills at the elbows and a tucker in the V-shaped neck of the blouse. They marvelled at their audacity, but felt sure they had done the right thing when they cut the neck rather lower than they would have for a dress to be worn in the daytime. + 

Martha M’Cready, insisting on having a finger in the pie, had pressed the dress when it was finished, and she had washed and ironed Mrs. George Woods’ best embroidered petticoat for Sophie to wear with it. + 

And now Sophie was dressing in Mrs. Woods’ bedroom because it had a bigger mirror than her own room, and the three women were watching her, giving little tugs and pats to the dress now and then, measuring it with appraising glances of conscious pride in their workmanship, and joy at Sophie’s appearance in it. Sophie, her face flushed, her eyes shining, turned to them every now and then, begging to know whether the skirt was not a little full here, or a little flat there; and they pinched and pulled, until it was thought nothing further could be done to improve it. + 

Sophie was anxious about her hair. She had put it in plaits the night before, and had kept it in them all the morning. Her hair had never been in plaits before, and she had not liked the look of it when she saw it all crisp and frizzy, like Mirry Flail’s. She had used a wet brush to get the crinkle out, but there was still a suggestion of it in the heavy dark wave of her hair when she had done it up as usual. + 

“Your hair looks very nice⁠—don’t worry any more about it, Sophie,” Martha M’Cready had said. + 

“My mother used to say there was nothing nicer for a young girl to wear than white muslin,” Mrs. Woods remarked, “and that sash of your mother’s looks real nice as a belt, Sophie.” + 

The sash, a broad piece of blue and green silk shot like a piece of poor opal, Sophie had found in a box of her mother’s, and it was wound round her waist as a belt and tied in a bow at the side. + 

“Turn round and let me see if the skirt’s quite the same length all round, Sophie,” Mrs. Grant commanded. + 

“Yes, Maggie,” Bessie Woods exclaimed complacently. “It’s quite right.” + 

Sophie glanced at herself in the glass again. Mrs. Woods had lent her a pair of opal earrings, and Maggie Grant the one piece of finery she possessed⁠—a round piece of very fine black opal set in a rim of gold, which Bill had given her when first she came to the Ridge. + 

Sophie had on for the first time, too, a necklace she had made herself of stones the miners had given her at different times. There was a piece of opal for almost every man on the fields, and she had strung them together, with a beautiful knobby Potch had made her a present of for her eighteenth birthday, a few days before, in the centre. + 

Just as she had finished dressing, Mrs. Watty Frost called in the doorway: “Anybody at home?” + 

“Come in,” Mrs. George Woods replied. + 

Mrs. Watty walked into the bedroom. She had a long slender parcel wrapped in brown paper in her hand, but nobody noticed it at the time. + 

“My!” she exclaimed, staring at Sophie; “we are fine, aren’t we?” + 

Sophie caught up her long, cotton gloves and pirouetted in happy excitement. + 

“Aren’t we?” she cried gaily. “Just look at my gloves! Did ever you see such lovely long gloves, Mrs. Watty? And don’t my earrings look nice? But it does feel funny wearing earrings, doesn’t it? I want to be shaking my head all the time to make them joggle!” + 

She shook her head. The blue and green fires of the stones leapt and sparkled. Her eyes seemed to catch fire from them. The women exchanged admiring glances. + 

“Where’s my handkerchief?” Sophie cried. “Father’s late, isn’t he? I’m sure we’ll be late! How long will it take to drive over to Warria?⁠—An hour? Goodness! And it’ll be almost time for the dance to begin then! Oh, don’t my shoes look nice, Maggie?” + 

She looked down at her feet in the white cotton stockings and white canvas shoes, with ankle straps, which Maggie Grant had sent into Budda for. The hem of her skirt came just to her ankles. She played the new shoes in and out from under it in little dancing steps, and the women laughed at her, happy in her happiness. + 

“But you haven’t got a fan, Sophie,” Mrs. Watty said. + 

“A fan?” Sophie’s eyes widened. + 

“You should oughter have a fan. In my young days it wasn’t considered decent to go to a ball without a fan,” Mrs. Watty remarked grimly. + 

“Oh!” Sophie looked from one to the other of her advisers. + 

Mrs. George Woods was just going to say that it was a long time since Mrs. Watty’s young days, when Mrs. Watty took the brown paper from the long, thin parcel she was carrying. + 

“I thought most likely you wouldn’t have one,” she said, “so I brought this over.” + 

She unfurled an old-fashioned, long-handled, sandalwood fan, with birds and flowers painted on the brown satin screen, and a little row of feathers along the top. Mrs. George Woods and Mrs. Grant exchanged glances that Mrs. Watty should pander to the vanity of an occasion. + 

“Mrs. Watty!” Sophie took the fan with a little cry of delight. + 

“My, aren’t you a grown-up young lady now, Sophie?” Mrs. Woods exclaimed, as Sophie unfurled the fan. + 

“But mind you take care of it, Sophie,” Mrs. Watty said, stiffening against the relaxing atmosphere of goodwill and excitement. “Watty got it for me last trip he made to sea, before we was married, and I set a good deal of store by it.” + 

“Oh, I’ll be ever so careful!” Sophie declared. She opened the fan. “Isn’t it pretty?” + 

Dropping into a chair, she murmured: “May I⁠—have this dance with you, Miss Rouminof?” And casting a shy upward glance over her fan, as if answering for herself, “I don’t mind if I do!” + 

Martha and Mrs. Woods laughed heartily, recognising Arthur Henty’s way of talking in the voice Sophie had imitated. + 

“That’s the way to do it, Sophie,” Mrs. Woods said; “only you shouldn’t say, ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ but, ‘It’s a pleasure, I’m sure.’ ” + 

“It’s a pleasure, I’m sure,” Sophie mimed. + 

“Is she going to wear the dress over?” Mrs. Watty asked anxiously. + 

“Yes,” Maggie Grant said. “Bessie’s lending her a dust-coat. I don’t think it’ll get crushed very much. You see, they won’t arrive until it’s nearly time for the dance to begin, and we thought it’d be better for us to help her to get fixed up. Everybody’ll be so busy over at Warria⁠—and we thought she mightn’t be able to get anybody to do up her dress for her.” + 

“That’s right,” Mrs. Watty said. + 

There was a rattle of wheels on the rough shingle near the hut. + 

“Here’s your father, Sophie,” Martha called. + 

“And Michael and Potch are in the kitchen wanting to have a look at you before you go, Sophie,” Maggie Grant said. + 

“Oh!” Sophie took the coat Mrs. Woods was lending her, and went out to the kitchen with it on her arm. + 

Michael and Potch were there. They stared at her. But her radiant face, the shining eyes, and the little smile which hovered on her mouth, held their gaze more than the new white dress standing out in slight, stiff folds all round her. The vision of her⁠—incomparable youth and loveliness she was to Michael⁠—gripped him so that a moisture of love and reverence dimmed his eyes.⁠ ⁠… And Potch just stared and stared at her. + 

Paul was bawling from the buggy outside: + 

“Are you ready, Sophie? Sophie, are you ready?” + 

Mrs. Woods held the dust-coat. Very carefully Sophie edged herself into it, and wrapped its nondescript buff-coloured folds over her dress. Then she put the pink woollen scarf Martha had brought over her head, and went out to the buggy. Her father was sitting aloft on the front seat, driving Sam Nancarrow’s old roan mare, and looking spruce and well turned out in a new baggy suit which Michael had arranged for him to get in order to look more of a credit to Sophie at the ball. + 

“See you take good care of her, Paul,” Mrs. Grant called after him as they drove off. + 

XV + 

The drive across the plains seemed interminable to Sophie. + 

Paul hummed and talked of the music he was going to play as they went along. He called to Sam Nancarrow’s old nag, quite pleased to be having a horse to drive as though it belonged to him, and gossiped genially about this and other balls he had been to. + 

Sophie kept remembering what Mrs. Grant and Mrs. George Woods had said, and how she had looked in those glimpses of herself in the mirror. “I do look nice! I do look nice!” she assured herself. + 

It was wonderful to be going to a ball at Warria. She had never thought she could look as she did in this new frock, with her necklace, and Mrs. Woods’ earrings, and that old sash of her mother’s. She was a little anxious, but very happy and excited. + 

She remembered how Arthur had looked at her when she met him on the road or in the paddock sometimes. She only had on her old black dress then. He must like her in this new dress, she thought. Her mind had a subtle recoil from the too great joy of thinking how much more he must like her in this pretty, new, white frock; she sat in a delicious trance of happiness. Her father hummed and gossiped. All the stars came out. The sky was a wonderful blue where it met the horizon, and darkened to indigo as it climbed to the zenith. + 

When they drove from the shadow of the coolebahs which formed an avenue from the gate of the home paddock to the veranda of the homestead, Ted Burton, the station bookkeeper, a porky, good-natured little man, with light, twinkling eyes, whose face looked as if it had been sandpapered, came out to meet them. + 

“There you are, Rouminof!” he said. “Glad to see you. We were beginning to be afraid you weren’t coming!” + 

Sophie got down from the buggy, and her father drove off to the stables. Passing the veranda steps with Mr. Burton, she glanced up. Several men were on the steps. Her eyes went instinctively to Arthur Henty, who was standing at the foot of them, a yellow puppy fawning at his feet. He did not look up as Sophie passed, pretending to be occupied with the pup. But in that fleeting glance her brain had photographed the bruise on his forehead where it had caught a veranda post when Bully Bryant, having regained his feet, hit out blindly. + 

Potch had told Sophie what happened⁠—she had made him find out in order to tell her. Arthur and Bully had wanted to fight, but after the first exchange of blows the men had held them back. Bully was mad drunk, they said, and would have hammered Henty to pulp. And the next evening Bully came to Sophie, heavy with shame, and ready to cry for what he had done. + 

“If anybody’d ’ve told me I’d treat you like that, Sophie, I’d ’ve killed him,” he said. “I’d ’ve killed him.⁠ ⁠… You know how I feel about you⁠—you know how we all feel about you⁠—and for me to have served you like that⁠—me that’d do anything in the world for you.⁠ ⁠… But it’s no good trying to say any more. It’s no good tryin’ to explain. It’s got me down.⁠ ⁠…” + 

He sat with his head in his hands for a while, so ashamed and miserable, that Sophie could not retain her wrath and resentment against him. It was like having a brother in trouble and doing nothing to help him, to see Bully like this. + 

“It’s all right, Bully,” she said. “I know⁠ ⁠… you weren’t yourself⁠ ⁠… and you didn’t mean it.” + 

He started to his feet and came to stand beside her. Sophie put her hand in his; he gripped it hard, unable to say anything. Then, when he could control his voice, he said: + 

“I went over to see Mr. Henty this morning⁠ ⁠… and told him if anybody else ’d done what I did, I’d ’ve done what he did.” + 

Potch had said the men expected Bully would want to fight the thing out when he was sober, and it was a big thing for him to have done what he had. The punishing power of Bully’s fists was well known, and he had taken this way of punishing himself. Sophie understood that. She was grateful and reconciled to him. + 

“I’m glad, Bully,” she said. “Let’s forget all about it.” + 

So the matter ended. But it all came back to her as she saw the broken red line on Arthur Henty’s forehead. + 

She did not know that because of it she was an object of interest to the crowd on the veranda. News of Arthur Henty’s bout with Bully Bryant had been very soon noised over the whole countryside. Most of the men who came to the ball from Langi-Eumina and other stations had gleaned varied and highly-coloured versions, and Arthur had been chaffed and twitted until he was sore and ashamed of the whole incident. He could not understand himself⁠—the rush of rage, instinctive and unreasoning, which had overwhelmed him when he hit out at Bully. + 

His mother protested that it was a shame to give Arthur such a bad time for what was, after all, merely the chivalrous impulse of any decent young man when a girl was treated lightly in his presence; but the men and the girls who were staying at the station laughed and teased all the more for the explanation. They pretended he was a very heroic and quixotic young man, and asked about Sophie⁠—whether she was pretty, and whether it was true she sang well. They redoubled their efforts, and goaded him to a state of sulky silence, when they knew she was coming to the ball. + 

Arthur Henty had been conscious for some time of an undercurrent within him drawing him to Sophie. He was afraid of, and resented it. He had not thought of loving her, or marrying her. He had gone to the tank paddock in the afternoons he knew she would be there, or had looked for her on the Warria road when she had been to the cemetery, with a sensation of drifting pleasantly. He had never before felt as he did when he was with Sophie, that life was a clear and simple thing⁠—pleasant, too; that nothing could be better than walking over the plains through the limpid twilight. He had liked to see the fires of opal run in her eyes when she looked at him; to note the black lines on the outer rim of their coloured orbs; the black lashes set in silken skin of purest ivory; the curve of her chin and neck; the lines of her mouth, and the way she walked; all these things he had loved. But he did not want to have the responsibility of loving Sophie: he could not contemplate what wanting to marry her would mean in tempests and turmoil with his family. + 

He had thought sometimes of a medieval knight wandering through flowering fields with the girl on a horse beside him, in connection with Sophie and himself. A reproduction of the well-known picture of the knight and the girl hung in his mother’s sitting-room. She had cut it out of a magazine, and framed it, because it pleased her; and beneath the picture, in fine print, Arthur had often read: + 

“I met a lady in the meads, + 

Full beautiful⁠—a fairy’s child; + 

Her hair was long, her foot was light, + 

And her eyes were wild. + 

“I set her on my pacing steed, + 

And nothing else saw all day long; + 

For sideways would she lean, and sing + 

A faery’s song.” + 

As a small boy Arthur had been attracted by the picture, and his mother had told him its story, and had read him Keats’ poem. He had read it ever so many times since then himself, and after he met Sophie in the tank paddock that afternoon she had ridden home on his horse, some of the verses haunted him with the thought of her. One day when they were sitting by the track and she had been singing to him, he had made a daisy chain and thrown it over her, murmuring sheepishly, in a caprice of tenderness: + 

“I made a garland for her head, + 

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; + 

She looked at me as she did love + 

And made sweet moan.” + 

Sophie had asked about the poem. She had wanted to hear more, and he had repeated as many verses as he could remember. When he had finished, she had looked at him “as she did love” indeed, with eyes of sweet confidence, yet withdrawing from him a little in shy and happy confusion that he should think of her as anyone like the lady of the meads, who was “full beautiful⁠—a fairy’s child.” + 

But Arthur did not want to love her; he did not want to marry her. He did not want to have rows with his father, differences with his mother. The affair at Newton’s had shown him where he was going. + 

Sophie was “a fairy’s child,” he decided. “Her hair as long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild”; but he did not want to be “a wretched wight, alone and palely loitering” on her account; he did not want to marry her. He would close her eyes with “kisses four,” he told himself, smiling at the precision of the knight of the chronicle; “kisses four”⁠—no more⁠—and be done with the business. + 

Meanwhile, he wished Sophie were not coming to the ball. He would have given anything to prevent her coming; but he could do nothing. + 

He had thought of escaping from the ball by going to the outstation with the men; but his mother, foreseeing something of his intention, had given him so much to do at the homestead for her, that he could not go away. When the buggy with Sophie and her father drove up to the veranda, there was a chorus of suppressed exclamations among the assembled guests. + 

“Here she is, Art!” + 

“Buck up, old chap! None but the brave, etc.” + 

Sophie did not hear the undertone of laughter and raillery which greeted her arrival. She was quite unconscious that the people on the veranda were interested in her at all, as she walked across the courtyard listening to Mr. Burton’s amiable commonplaces. + 

When Mr. Burton left her in a small room with chintz-covered chairs and dressing-table, Sophie took off her old dust-coat and the pink scarf she had tied over her hair. The mirror was longer than Mrs. Woods’. Her dress looked very crushed when she saw it reflected. She tried to shake out the creases. Her hair, too, was flat, and had blown into stringy ends. A shade of disappointment dimmed the brightness of her mood as she realised she was not looking nearly as nice as she had when she left the Ridge. + 

Someone said: “May I come in?” and Polly Henty and another girl entered the room. + 

Polly Henty had just left school. She was a round-faced, jolly-looking girl of about Sophie’s own age, and the girl with her was not much older, pretty and sprightly, an inch or so taller than Polly, and slight. She had grey eyes, and a fluff of dry-grass coloured hair about a small, sharp-featured, fresh-complexioned face, neatly powdered. + 

Sophie knew something was wrong with her clothes the moment she encountered the girls’ curious and patronising glances as they came into the room. Their appearance, too, took the skin from her vanity. Polly had on a frock of silky white crêpe, with no lace or decoration of any kind, except a small gold locket and chain which she was wearing. But her dress fell round her in graceful folds, showing her small, well-rounded bust and hips, and she had on silk stockings and white satin slippers. The other girl’s frock was of pale pink, misty material, so thin that her shoulders and arms showed through it as though there were nothing on them. She had pinned a pink rose in her hair, too, so that its petals just lay against the nape of her neck. Sophie thought she had never seen anyone look so nice. She had never dreamed of such a dress. + 

“Oh, Miss Rouminof,” Polly said; “mother sent me to look for you. We’re just ready to start, and your father wants you to turn over his music for him.” + 

Sophie stood up, conscious that her dress was nothing like as pretty as she had thought it. It stood out stiffly about her: the starched petticoat crackled as she moved. She knew the lace should not have been on her sleeves; that her shoes were of canvas, and creaked as she walked; that her cotton gloves, and even the heavy, old-fashioned fan she was carrying, were not what they ought to have been. + 

“Miss Chelmsford⁠—Miss Rouminof,” Polly said, looking from Sophie to the girl in the pink dress. + 

Sophie said: “How do you do?” gravely, and put out her hand. + 

“Oh!⁠ ⁠… How do you do?” Miss Chelmsford responded hurriedly, and as if just remembering she, too, had a hand. + 

Sophie went with Polly and her friend to the veranda, which was screened in on one side with hessian to form a ballroom. Behind the hessian the walls were draped with flags, sheaves of paper daisies, and bundles of Darling pea. Red paper lanterns swung from the roof, threw a rosy glare over the floor which had been polished until it shone like burnished metal. + 

Polly Henty took Sophie to the piano where Mrs. Henty was playing the opening bars of a waltz. Paul beside her, his violin under his arm, stood looking with eager interest over the room where men and girls were chatting in little groups. + 

Mrs. Henty nodded and smiled to Sophie. Her father signalled to her, and she went to a seat near him. + 

Holding her hands over the piano, Mrs. Henty looked to Paul to see if he were ready. He lifted his violin, tucked it under his chin, drew his bow, and the piano and violin broke gaily, irregularly, uncertainly, at first, into a measure which set and kept the couples swaying round the edge of the ballroom. + 

Sophie watched them at first, dazed and interested. Under the glow of the lanterns, the figures of the dancers looked strange and solemn. Some of the dancers were moving without any conscious effort, just skimming the floor like swallows; others were working hard as they danced. Tom Henderson held Elizabeth Henty as if he never intended to let go of her, and worked her arm up and down as if it were a semaphore. + 

Sophie had always admired Arthur’s eldest sister, and she thought Elizabeth the most beautiful-looking person she had ever seen this evening. And that pink dress⁠—how pretty it was! What had Polly said her name was⁠—the girl who wore it? Phyllis⁠ ⁠… Phyllis Chelmsford.⁠ ⁠… Sophie watched the dress flutter among the dancers some time before she noticed Miss Chelmsford was dancing with Arthur Henty. + 

She watched the couples revolving, dazed, and thinking vaguely about them, noticing how pretty feet looked in satin slippers with high, curved heels, wondering why some men danced with stiff knees and others as if their knees had funny-bones like their elbows. The red light from the lanterns made the whole scene look unreal; she felt as if she were dreaming. + 

“Sophie!” her father cried sharply. + 

She turned his page. Her eyes wandered to Mrs. Henty, who sat with her back to her. Sophie contemplated the bow of her back in its black frock with Spanish lace scarf across it, the outline of the black lace on the wrinkled skin of Mrs. Henty’s neck, the loose, upward wave of her crisp white hair, glinting silverly where the light caught it. Her face was cobwebbed with wrinkles, but her features remained delicate and fine as sculpturings in ancient ivory. Her eyes were bright: the sparkle of youth still leapt in them. Her eyes had a slight smile of secret sympathy and amusement as they flew over the roomful of people dancing. + 

Sophie watched dance after dance, while the music jingled and jangled. + 

Presently John Armitage appeared in the doorway with Nina Henty. Sophie heard him apologising to Mrs. Henty for being late, and explaining that he had stayed in the back-country a few days longer than usual for the express purpose of coming to the ball. + 

Mrs. Henty replied that it was “better late than never,” and a pleasure to see Mr. Armitage at any time; and then he and Nina joined the throng of the dancers. + 

Sophie drew her chair further back so that the piano screened her. The disappointment and stillness which had descended upon her since she came into the room tightened and settled. She had thought Arthur would surely come to ask her for this dance; but when the waltz began she saw he was dancing again with Phyllis Chelmsford. She sat very still, holding herself so that she should not feel a pain which was hovering in the background of her consciousness and waiting to grip her. + 

It was different, this sitting on a chair by herself and watching other people dance, to anything that had ever happened to her. She had always been the centre of Ridge balls, courted and made a lot of from the moment she came into the hall. Even Arthur Henty had had to shoulder his way if he wanted a waltz with her. + 

As the crowd brushed and swirled round the room, it became all blurred to Sophie. The last rag of that mood of tremulous joyousness which had invested her as she drove over the plains to the ball with her father, left her. She sat very still; she could not see for a moment. The waltz broke because she did not hear her father when he called her to turn the page of his music; he knocked over his stand trying to turn the page himself, and exclaimed angrily when Sophie did not jump to pick it up for him. + 

After that she watched his book of music with an odd calm. She scarcely looked at the dancers, praying for the time to come when the ball would end and she could go home. The hours were heavy and dead; she thought it would never be midnight or morning again. She was conscious of her crushed dress and cotton gloves, and Mrs. Watty’s big, old-fashioned fan; but after the first shock of disappointment she was not ashamed of them. She sat very straight and still in the midst of her finery; but she put the fan on the chair behind her, and took off her gloves in order to turn over the pages of her father’s music more expertly. + 

She knew now she was not going to dance. She understood she had not been invited as a guest like everybody else; but as the fiddler’s little girl to turn over his music for him. And when she was not watching the music, she sat down in her chair beyond the piano, hoping no one would see or speak to her. + 

Mrs. Henty spoke to her occasionally. Once she called pleasantly: + 

“Come here and let me look at your opals, child.” + 

Sophie went to her, and Mrs. Henty lifted the necklace. + 

“What splendid stones!” she said. + 

Sophie looked into those bright eyes, very like Arthur’s, with the same shifting sands in them, but alien to her, she thought. + 

“Yes,” she said quietly. She did not feel inclined to tell Mrs. Henty about the stones. + 

Mrs. Henty admired the earrings, and looked appreciatively at the big flat stone in Mrs. Grant’s brooch. Sophie coloured under her attention. She wished she had not worn the opals that did not belong to her. + 

Looking into Sophie’s face, Mrs. Henty became aware of its sensitive, unformed beauty, a beauty of expression rather than features, and of a something indefinable which cast a glamour over the girl. She had been considerably disturbed by Arthur’s share in the brawl at Newton’s. It was so unlike Arthur to show fight of any sort. If it had not happened after she had sent the invitation, Mrs. Henty would not have spoken of Sophie when she asked Rouminof to play at the ball. As it was, she was not sorry to see what manner of girl she was. + 

But as Sophie held a small, quiet face before her, with chin slightly uplifted, and eyes steady and measuring, a little disdainful despite their pain and surprise, Mrs. Henty realised it was a shame to have brought this girl to the ball, in order to inspect her; to discover what Arthur thought of her, and not in order that she might have a good time like other girls. After all, she was young and used to having a good time. Mrs. Henty heard enough of Ridge gossip to know any man on the mines thought the world of Sophie Rouminof. She had seen them eager to dance with her at race balls. It was not fair to have sidetracked her about Arthur, Mrs. Henty confessed to herself. The fine, clear innocence which looked from Sophie’s eyes accused her. It made her feel mean and cruel. She was disturbed by a sensation of guilt. + 

Paul was fidgeting at the first bars of the next dance, and, knowing the long programme to go through, Mrs. Henty’s hand fell from Sophie’s necklace, and Sophie went back to her chair. + 

But Mrs. Henty’s thoughts wandered on the themes she had raised. She played absentmindedly, her fingers skipping and skirling on the notes. She was realising what she had done. She had not meant to be cruel, she protested: she had just wished to know how Arthur felt about the girl. If he had wanted to dance with her, there was nothing to prevent him. + 

Arthur was dancing again with Phyllis, she noticed. She was a little annoyed. He was overdoing the thing. And Phyllis was a minx! That was the fourth time she had slipped and Arthur had held her up, the rose in her hair brushing his cheek. + 

“Mother!” Polly called. “For goodness’ sake⁠ ⁠… what are you dreaming of?” + 

The music had gone to the pace of Mrs. Henty’s reverie until Polly called. Then Mrs. Henty splashed out her chords and marked her rhythm more briskly. + 

After all, Mrs. Henty concluded, if Arthur and Phyllis had taken a fancy to each, other⁠—at last⁠—and were getting on, she could not afford to espouse the other girl’s cause. What good would it do? She wanted Arthur to marry Phyllis. His father did. Phyllis was the only daughter of old Chelmsford, of Yuina Yuina, whose cattle sales were the envy of pastoralists on both sides of the Queensland border. Phyllis’s inheritance and the knowledge that the interests of Warria were allied to those of Andrew Chelmsford of Yuina, would ensure a new lease of hope and opportunity for Warria.⁠ ⁠… Whereas it would be worse than awful if Arthur contemplated anything like marriage with this girl from the Ridge. + 

Mrs. Henty’s conscience was uneasy all the same. When the dance was ended, she called Arthur to her. + 

“For goodness’ sake, dear, ask that child to dance with you,” she said when he came to her. “She’s been sitting here all the evening by herself.” + 

“I was just going to,” Sophie heard Arthur say. + 

He came towards her. + 

“Will you have the next dance with me, Sophie?” he asked. + 

She did not look at him. + 

“No,” she said. + 

“Oh, I say⁠—” He sat down beside her. “I’ve had to dance with these people who are staying with us,” he added awkwardly. + 

Her eyes turned to him, all the stormy fires of opal running in them. + 

“You don’t have to dance with me,” she said. + 

He got up and stood indecisively a moment. + 

“Of course not,” he said, “but I want to.” + 

“I don’t want to dance with you,” Sophie said. + 

He turned away from her, went down the ballroom, and out through the doorway in the hessian wall. Everyone had gone to supper. Mrs. Henty had left the piano. Paul himself had gone to have some refreshment which was being served in the dining-room across the courtyard. From the square, washed with the silver radiance of moonlight which she could see through the open space in the hessian, came a tinkle of glasses and spoons, fragments of talking and laughter. Sophie heard a clear, girlish voice cry: “Oh, Arthur!” + 

She clenched her hands; she thought that she was going to cry; but stiffening against the inclination, she sat fighting down the pain which was gripping her, and longed for the time to come when she could go home and be out in the dark, alone. + 

John Armitage entered the ballroom as if looking for someone. Glancing in the direction of the piano, he saw Sophie. + 

“There you are, Sophie!” he exclaimed heartily. “And, would you believe it, I’ve only just discovered you were here.” + 

He sat down beside her, and talked lightly, kindly, for a moment. But Sophie was in no mood for talking. John Armitage had guessed something of her crisis when he came into the room and found her sitting by herself. He had seen the affair at Newton’s, and knew enough of Fallen Star gossip to understand how Sophie would resent Arthur Henty’s treatment of her. He could see she was a sorely hurt little creature, holding herself together, but throbbing with pain and anger. She could not talk; she could only think of Arthur Henty, whose voice they heard occasionally out of doors. He was more than jolly after supper. Armitage had seen him swallow nearly a glassful of raw whisky. His face had gone a ghastly white after it. Rouminof had been drinking too. He came into the room unsteadily when Mrs. Henty took her seat at the piano again; but he played better. + 

Armitage’s eyes went to her necklace. + 

“What lovely stones, Sophie!” he said. + 

Sophie looked up. “Yes, aren’t they? The men gave them to me⁠—there’s a stone for everyone. This is Michael’s!”⁠—she touched each stone as she named it⁠—“Potch gave me that, and Bully Bryant that.” + 

Her eyes caught Armitage’s with a little smile. + 

“It’s easy to see where good stones go on the Ridge,” he said. “And here am I⁠—come hundreds of miles⁠ ⁠… can’t get anything like that piece of stuff in your brooch.” + 

“That’s Mrs. Grant’s,” Sophie confessed. + 

“And your earrings, Sophie!” Armitage said. “ ‘Clare to goodness,’ as my old nurse used to say, I didn’t think you could look such a witch. But I always have said black opal earrings would make a witch of a New England spinster.” + 

Sophie laughed. It was impossible not to respond to Mr. Armitage when he looked and smiled like that. His manner was so friendly and appreciative, Sophie was thawed and insensibly exhilarated by it. + 

Armitage sat talking to her. Sophie had always interested him. There was an unusual quality about her; it was like the odour some flowers have, of indescribable attraction for certain insects, to him. And it was so extraordinary, to find anyone singing arias from old-fashioned operas in this out-of-the-way part of the world. + 

John Lincoln Armitage had a man of the world’s contempt for churlish treatment of a woman, and he was indignant that the Hentys should have permitted a girl to be so humiliated in their house. He had been paying Nina Henty some mild attention during the evening, but Sophie in distress enlisted the instinct of that famous ancestor of his in her defence. He determined to make amends as far as possible for her disappointment of the earlier part of the evening. + 

“May I have the next dance, Sophie?” he inquired. + 

Sophie glanced up at him. + 

“I’m not dancing,” she said. + 

Her averted face, the quiver of her lips, confirmed him in his resolution. He took in her dress, the black opals in her earrings swinging against her black hair and white neck. She had never looked more attractive, he thought, than in this unlovely dress and with the opals in her ears. The music was beginning for another dance. Across the room Henty was hovering with a bevy of girls. + 

“Why aren’t you dancing, Sophie?” John Armitage asked. + 

His quiet, friendly tone brought the glitter of tears to her eyes. + 

“No one asked me to, until the dance before supper⁠—then I didn’t want to,” she said. + 

The dance was already in motion. + 

“You’ll have this one with me, won’t you?” + 

John Armitage put the question as if he were asking a favour. “Please!” he insisted. + 

Putting her arm on his, Armitage led Sophie among the dancers. He held her so gently and firmly that she felt as if she were dancing by a will not her own. She and he glided and flew together; they did not talk, and when the music stopped, Mr. Armitage took her through the doorway into the moonlight with the other couples. They walked to the garden where, the orange trees were in blossom. + 

“Oh!” Sophie breathed, her arm still on his, and a little giddy. + 

The earth was steeped in purest radiance; the orange blossoms swam like stars on the dark bushes; their fragrance filled the air. + 

Sophie held up her face as if to drink. “Isn’t it lovely?” she murmured. + 

A black butterfly with white etchings on his wings hovered over an orange bush they were standing near, as if bewildered by the moonlight and mistaking it for the light of a strange day. + 

Armitage spread his handkerchief on a wooden seat. + 

“I thought you’d like it,” he said. “Let’s sit here⁠—I’ve put down my handkerchief because there’s a dew, although the air seems so dry.” + 

When the music began again Sophie got up. + 

“Don’t let us go in yet,” he begged. + 

“But⁠—” she demurred. + 

“We’ll stay here for this, and have the next dance,” Armitage said. + 

Sophie hesitated. She wondered why Mr. Armitage was being so nice to her, understanding a little. She smiled into his eyes, dallying with the temptation. John Armitage had seen women’s eyes like that before; then fall to the appeal of his own. But in Sophie’s eyes he found something he had not seen very often⁠—a will-o’the-wisp of infinite wispishness which incited him to pursue and to insist, while it eluded and flew from him. + 

When she danced with John Armitage again, Sophie looked up, laughed, and played her eyes and smiles for him as she had seen Phyllis Chelmsford do for Arthur. At first, shyly, she had exerted herself to please him, and Armitage had responded to her tentative efforts; but presently she found herself enjoying the game. And Armitage was so surprised at the charm she revealed as she exerted herself to please him, that he responded with an enthusiasm he had not contemplated. But their mutual success at this oldest diversion in the world, while it surprised and delighted them, did not delight their hosts. Mr. and Mrs. Henty were surprised; then frankly scandalised. Several young men asked Sophie to dance with them after she had danced with John Armitage. She thanked them, but refused, saying she did not wish to dance very much. She sat in her chair by the piano except when she was dancing with Mr. Armitage, or was in the garden with him. + 

XVI + 

“See Ed means to do you well with a six-horse team this evening, Mr. Armitage,” Peter Newton said, while Armitage was having his early meal before starting on his all-night drive into Budda. + 

Newton remembered afterwards that John Armitage did not seem as interested and jolly as usual. Ordinarily he was interested in everything, and cordial with everybody; but this evening he was quiet and preoccupied. + 

“Hardly had a word to say for himself,” Peter Newton said. + 

Armitage had watched Ed bring the old bone-shaking shandrydan he called a coach up to the hotel, and put a couple of young horses into it. He had a colt on the wheel he was breaking-in, and a sturdy old dark bay beside him, a pair of fine rusty bays ahead of them, and a sorrel, and chestnut youngster in the lead. He had got old Olsen and two men on the hotel veranda to help him harness-up, and it took them all their time to get the leaders into the traces. Bags had to be thrown over the heads of the young horses before anything could be done with them, and it took three men to hold on to the team until Ed Ventry got into his seat and gathered up the reins. Armitage put his valise on the coach and shook hands all round. He got into his seat beside Ed and wrapped a tarpaulin lined with possum skin over his knees. + 

“Let her go, Olly,” Ed yelled. + 

The men threw off the bags they had been holding over the horses’ heads. The leaders sprang out and swayed; the coach rocked to the shock; the steady old wheeler leapt forward. The colt under the whip, trying to throw himself down on the trace, leapt and kicked, but the leaders dashed forward; the coach lurched and was carried along with a rattle and clash of gear, Ed Ventry, the reins wrapped round his hands, pulling on them, and yelling: + 

“I’ll warm yer.⁠ ⁠… Yer lazy, wobblin’ old adders⁠—yer! I’ll warm yer.⁠ ⁠… Yer wobble like a crosscut saw.⁠ ⁠… Kim ovah! Kim ovah, there! I’ll get alongside of yer! Kim ovah!” + 

Swaying and rocking like a ship in a stormy sea, the coach turned out of the town. Armitage thought its timbers would be strewn along the road at any moment; but the young horses, under Mr. Ventry’s masterly grip, soon took the steady pace of the old roadsters; their freshness wore off, and they were going at a smart, even pace by the time the Three Mile was reached. + 

“Seemed to have something on his mind,” Ed Ventry said afterwards. “Ordinarily, he’s keen to hear all the yarns you can tell him, but that day he was dead quiet.” + 

“ ‘Not much doin’ on the Ridge just now, Mr. Armitage,’ I says. + 

“ ‘No, Ed,’ he says. + 

“ ‘Hardly worth y’r while comin’ all the way from America to get all you got this trip?’ + 

“ ‘No,’ he says. But, by God⁠—if I’d known what he got⁠—” + 

It was an all-night trip. Ed and Mr. Armitage had left the Ridge at six o’clock and arrived in Budda township about an hour before the morning train left for Sydney. There was just time for Armitage to breakfast at the hotel before he went off in the hotel drag to the station. The train left at half-past six. But Ed Ventry had taken off his hat and scratched his grizzled thatch when he saw a young, baldy-faced gelding in the paddock with the other coach horses that evening. + 

“Could’ve swore I left Baldy at the Ridge,” he said to the boy who looked after the stables at the Budda end of his journey. + 

“Thought he was there meself,” the lad replied, imitating Ed’s perplexed head-scratching. + 

At the Ridge, when he made his next trip, they were able to tell Mr. Ventry how the baldy-face happened to be at Budda when Ed thought he was at Fallen Star, although Ed heard some of the explanation from Potch and Michael a day or two later. Sophie had ridden the baldy-face into Budda the night he drove Mr. Armitage to catch the train for Sydney. No one discovered she had gone until the end of next day. Then Potch went to Michael. + 

“Michael,” he said; “she’s gone.” + 

During the evening Paul had been heard calling Sophie. He asked Potch whether he had seen her. Potch said he had not. But it was nothing unusual for Sophie to wander off for a day on an excursion with Ella or Mirry Flail, so neither he nor Michael thought much of not having seen her all day, until Paul remarked querulously to Potch that he did not know where Sophie was. Looking into her room Potch saw her bed had not been slept in, although the room was disordered. He went up to the town, to Mrs. Newton and to the Flails’, to ask whether they had seen anything of Sophie. Mirry Flail said she had seen her on one of the coach-stable horses, riding out towards the Three Mile the evening before. Potch knew instinctively that Sophie had gone away from the moment Paul had spoken to him. She had lived away from him during the last few months; but watching her with always anxious, devout eyes, he had known more of her than anyone else. + 

Lying full stretch on his sofa, Michael was reading when Potch came into the hut. His stricken face communicated the seriousness of his news. Michael had no reason to ask who the “she” Potch spoke of was: there was only one woman for whom Potch would look like that. But Michael’s mind was paralysed by the shock of the thing Potch had said. He could neither stir nor speak. + 

“I’m riding into Budda, to find out if she went down by the train,” Potch said. “I think she did, Michael. She’s been talking about going to Sydney⁠ ⁠… a good deal lately.⁠ ⁠… She was asking me about it⁠—day before yesterday⁠ ⁠… but I never thought⁠—I never thought she wanted to go so soon⁠ ⁠… and that she’d go like this. But I think she has gone.⁠ ⁠… And she was afraid to tell us⁠—to let you know.⁠ ⁠… She said you’d made up your mind you didn’t want her to go⁠ ⁠… she’d heard her mother tell you not to let her go, and if ever she was going she wouldn’t tell you.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Potch’s explanation, broken and incoherent as it was, gave Michael’s thought and feeling time to reassert themselves. + 

He said: “See if Chassy can lend me his pony, and I’ll come with you, Potch.” + 

They rode into Budda that night, and inquiry from the stationmaster gave them the information they sought. A girl in a black frock had taken a second-class ticket for Sydney. He did not notice very much what she was like. She had come to the window by herself; she had no luggage; he had seen her later sitting in a corner of a second-class compartment by herself. The boy, a stranger to the district, who had clipped her ticket, said she was crying when he asked for her ticket. He had asked why she was crying. She had said she was going away, and she did not like going away from the back-country. She was going away⁠—to study singing, she said, but would be coming back some day. + 

Michael determined to go to Sydney by the morning train to try to find Sophie. He went to Ed Ventry and borrowed five pounds from him. + 

“That explains how the baldy-face got here,” Ed said. + 

Michael nodded. He could not talk about Sophie. Potch explained why they wanted the money as well as he could. + 

“It’s no good trying to bring her back if she doesn’t want to come, Michael,” Potch had said before Michael left for Sydney. + 

“No,” Michael agreed. + 

“If you could get her fixed up with somebody to stay with,” Potch suggested; “and see she was all right for money⁠ ⁠… it might be the best thing to do. I’ve got a bit of dough put by, Michael.⁠ ⁠… I’ll send that down to you and go over to one of the stations for a while to keep us goin’⁠—if we want more.” + 

Michael assented. + 

“You might try round and see if you could find Mr. Armitage,” Potch said, just before the train went. “He might have seen something of her.” + 

“Yes,” Michael replied, drearily. + 

Potch waited until the train left, and started back to Fallen Star in the evening. + 

A week later a letter came for Michael. It was in Sophie’s handwriting. Potch was beside himself with anxiety and excitement. He wrote to Michael, care of an opal-buyer they were on good terms with and who might know where Michael was staying. In the bewilderment of his going, Potch had not thought to ask Michael where he would live, or where a letter would find him. + 

Michael came back to Fallen Star when he received the letter. He had not seen Sophie. No one he knew or had spoken to had seen anything of her after she left the train. Michael handed the letter to Potch as soon as he got back into the hut. + 

Sophie wrote that she had gone away because she wanted to learn to be a singer, and that she would be on her way to America when they received it. She explained that she had made up her mind to go quite suddenly, and she had not wanted Michael to know because she remembered his promise to her mother. She knew he would not let her go away from the Ridge if he could help it. She had sold her necklace, she said, and had got £100 for it, so had plenty of money. Potch and Michael were not to worry about her. She would be all right, and when she had made a name for herself as a singer, she would come home to the Ridge to see them. “Don’t be angry, Michael dear,” the letter ended, “with your lovingest Sophie.” + 

Potch looked at Michael; he wondered whether the thought in his own mind had reached Michael’s. But Michael was too dazed and overwhelmed to think at all. + 

“There’s one thing, Potch,” he said; “if she’s gone to America, we could write to Mr. Armitage and ask him to keep an eye on her. And,” he added, “if she’s gone to America⁠ ⁠… it’s just likely she may be on the same boat as Mr. Armitage, and he’d look after her.” + 

Potch watched his face. The thought in his mind had not occurred to Michael, then, he surmised. + 

“He’d see she came to no harm.” + 

“Yes,” Potch said. + 

But he had seen John Armitage talking to Sophie on the Ridge over near Snowshoes’ hut the afternoon after the dance at Warria. He knew Mr. Armitage had driven Sophie home after the dance, too. Paul had been too drunk to stand, much less drive. Potch had knocked off early in the mine to go across to the Three Mile that afternoon. Then it had surprised Potch to see Sophie sitting and talking to Mr. Armitage as though they were very good friends; but, beyond a vague, jealous alarm, he had not attached any importance to it until he knew Sophie had gone down to Sydney by the same train as Mr. Armitage. She had said she was going to America, too, and he was going there. Potch had lived all his days on the Ridge; he knew nothing of the world outside, and its ways, except what he had learnt from books. But an instinct where Sophie was concerned had warned him of a link between her going away and John Armitage. That meeting of theirs came to have an extraordinary significance in his mind. He had thought out the chances of Sophie’s having gone with Mr. Armitage as far as he could. But Michael had not associated her going with him, it was clear. It had never occurred to him that Mr. Armitage could have anything to do with Sophie’s going away. It had not occurred to the rest of the Ridge folk either. + 

Paul was distracted. He made as great an outcry about Sophie’s going as he had about losing his stones. No one had thought he was as fond of her as he appeared to be. He wept and wailed continuously about her having gone away and left him. He went about begging for money in order to be able to go to America after Sophie; but no one would lend to him. + 

“You wait till Sophie’s made a name for herself, Paul,” everybody said, “then she’ll send for you.” + 

“Yes,” he assented eagerly. “But I don’t want to spend all that time here on the Ridge: I want to see something of life and the world again.” + 

Paul got a touch of the sun during the ferment of those weeks, and then, for two or three days, Michael and Potch had their work cut out nursing him through the delirium of sunstroke. + 

A week or so later the coach brought unexpected passengers⁠—Jun Johnson and the bright-eyed girl who had gone down on the coach with him⁠—and Jun introduced her to the boys at Newton’s as his bride. He had been down in Sydney on his honeymoon, he said, that was all. + 

When Michael went into the bar at Newton’s the same evening, he found Jun there, explaining as much to the boys. + 

“I know what you chaps think,” he was saying when Michael entered. “You think I put up the checkmate on old Rum-Enough, Charley played. Well, you’re wrong. I didn’t know no more about it than you did; and the proof is⁠—here I am. If I’d ’a’ done it, d’y’r think I’d have come back? If I’d had any share in the business, d’y’r think I’d be showin’ me face round here for a bit? Not much.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Silence hung between him and the men. Jun talked through it, warming to his task with the eloquence of virtue, liking his audience and the stage he had got all to himself, as an outraged and righteously indignant man. + 

“I know you chaps⁠—I know how you feel about things; and quite right, too! A man that’d go back on a mate like that⁠—why, he’s not fit to wipe your boots on. He ain’t fit to be called a man; he ain’t fit to be let run with the rest.” + 

He continued impressively; “I didn’t know no more about that business than any man-jack of you⁠—no more did Mrs. Jun.⁠ ⁠… Bygones is bygones⁠—that’s my motto. But I tell you⁠—and that’s the strength of it⁠—I didn’t know no more about those stones of Rummy’s than any man here. D’y’ believe me?” + 

It was said in good earnest enough, even Watty and George had to admit. It was either the best bit of bluff they had ever listened to, or else Jun, for once in a way, was enjoying the luxury of telling the truth. + 

“We’re all good triers here, Jun,” George said, “but we’re not as green as we’re painted.” + 

Jun regarded his beer meditatively; then he said: + 

“Look here, you chaps, suppose I put it to you straight: I ain’t always been what you might call the clean potato⁠ ⁠… but I ain’t always been married, either. Well, I’m married now⁠—married to the best little girl ever I struck.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The idea of Jun taking married life seriously amused two or three of the men. Smiles began to go round, and broadened as he talked. That they did not please Jun was evident. + 

“Well, seein’ I’ve taken on family responsibilities,” he went on⁠—“Was you smiling, Watty?” + 

“Me? Oh, no, Jun,” the offender replied, meekly; “it was only the stummick-ache took me. It does that way sometimes. You mightn’t think so, but I always look as if I was smilin’ when I’ve got the stummick-ache.” + 

George Woods, Pony-Fence Inglewood, and some of the others laughed, taking Watty’s explanation for what it was worth. But Jun continued solemnly, playing the reformed blackguard to his own satisfaction. + 

“Seein’ I’ve taken on family responsibilities, I want to run straight. I don’t want my kids to think there was anything crook about their dad.” + 

If he moved no one else, he contrived to feel deeply moved himself at the prospect of how his unborn children were going to regard him. The men who had always more or less believed in him managed to convince themselves that Jun meant what he said. George and Watty realised he had put up a good case, that he was getting at them in the only way possible. + 

Michael moved out of the crowd round the door towards the bar. Peter Newton put his daily ration of beer on the bar. + 

“ ’Lo, Michael,” Jun said. + 

“ ’Lo, Jun,” Michael said. + 

“Well,” Jun concluded, tossing off his beer; “that’s the way it is, boys. Believe me if y’r like, and if y’r don’t like⁠—lump it. + 

“But there’s one thing more I’ve got to tell you,” he added; “and if you find what I’ve been saying hard to believe, you’ll find this harder: I don’t believe Charley got those stones of Rummy’s.” + 

“What?” + 

The query was like the crack of a whiplash. There was a restive, restless movement among the men. + 

“I don’t believe Charley got those stones either,” Jun declared. “ ‘Got,’ I said, not ‘took.’ All I know is, he was like a sick fish when he reached Sydney⁠ ⁠… and sold all the opal he had with him. He was lively enough when we started out. I give you that. Maybe he took Rum-Enough’s stones all right; but somebody put it over on him. I thought it might be Emmy⁠—that yeller-haired tart, you remember, went down with us. She was a tart, and no mistake. My little girl, now⁠—she was never⁠ ⁠… like that! But Maud says she doesn’t think so, because Emmy turned Charley out neck and crop when she found he’d got no cash. He got mighty little for the bit of stone he had with him⁠ ⁠… I’ll take my oath. He came round to borrow from me a day or two after we arrived. And he was ragin’ mad about something.⁠ ⁠… If he shook the stones off Rum-Enough, it’s my belief somebody shook them off of him, either in the train or here⁠—or off of Rummy before he got them.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Several of the men muttered and grunted their protest. But Jun held to his point, and the talk became more general. Jun asked for news of the fields: what had been done, and who was getting the stuff. Somebody said John Armitage had been up and had bought a few nice stones from the Crosses, Pony-Fence, and Bully Bryant. + 

“Armitage?” Jun said. “He’s always a good man⁠—gives a fair price. He bought my stones, that last lot⁠ ⁠… gave me a hundred pounds for the big knobby. But it fair took my breath away to hear young Sophie Rouminof had gone off with him.” + 

Michael was standing beside him before the words were well out of his mouth. + 

“What did you say?” he demanded. + 

“I’m sorry, Michael,” Jun replied, after a quick, scared glance at the faces of the men about him. “But I took it for granted you all knew, of course. We saw them a good bit together down in Sydney, Maud and me, and she said she saw Sophie on the Zealanida the day the boat sailed. Maud was down seeing a friend off, and she saw Sophie and Mr. Armitage on board. She said⁠—” + 

Michael turned heavily, and swung out of the bar. + 

Jun looked after him. In the faces of the men he read what a bomb his news had been among them. + 

“I wouldn’t have said that for a lot,” he said, “if I’d ’ve thought Michael didn’t know. But, Lord, I thought he knew⁠ ⁠… I thought you all knew.” + 

In the days which followed, as he wandered over the plains in the late afternoon and evening, Michael tried to come to some understanding with himself of what had happened. At first he had been too overcast by the sense of loss to realise more than that Sophie had gone away. But now, beyond her going, he could see the failure of his own effort to control circumstances. He had failed; Sophie had gone; she had left the Ridge. + 

“God,” he groaned; “with the best intentions in the world, what an awful mess we make of things!” + 

Michael wondered whether it would have been worse for Sophie if she had gone away with Paul when her mother died. At least, Sophie was older now and better able to take care of herself. + 

He blamed himself because she had gone away as she had, all the same; the failure of the Ridge to hold her as well as his own failure beat him to the earth. He had hoped Sophie would care for the things her mother had cared for. He had tried to explain them to her. But Sophie, he thought now, had more the restless temperament of her father. He had not understood her young spirit, its craving for music, laughter, admiration, and the life that could give them to her. He had thought the Ridge would be enough for her, as it had been for her mother. + 

Michael never thought of Mrs. Rouminof as dead. He thought of her as though she were living some distance from him, that was all. In the evening he looked up at the stars, and there was one in which she seemed to be. Always he felt as if she were looking at him when its mild radiance fell over him. And now he looked to that star as if trying to explain and beg forgiveness. + 

His heart was sore because Sophie had left him without a word of affection or any explanation. His fear and anxiety for her gave him no peace. He sweated in agony with them for a long time, crying to her mother, praying her to believe he had not failed in his trust through lack of desire to serve her, but through a fault of understanding. If she had been near enough to talk to, he knew he could have explained that the girl was right: neither of them had any right to interfere with the course of her life. She had to go her own way; to learn joy and sorrow for herself. + 

Too late Michael realised that he had done all the harm in the world by seeking to make Sophie go his own and her mother’s way. He had opposed the tide of her youth and enthusiasm, instead of sympathising with it; and by so doing he had made it possible for someone else to sympathise and help her to go her own way. Opposition had forced her life into channels which he was afraid would heap sorrows upon her, whereas identification with her feeling and aspirations might have saved her the hurt and turmoil he had sought to save her. + 

Thought of what he had done to prevent Paul taking Sophie away haunted Michael. But, after all, he assured himself, he had not stolen from Paul. Charley had stolen from Paul, and he, Michael, was only holding Paul’s opals until he could give them to Paul when his having them would not do Sophie any harm.⁠ ⁠… His having them now could not injure Sophie.⁠ ⁠… Michael decided to give Paul the opals and explain how he came to have them, when the shock of what Jun had said left him. He tried not to think of that, although a consciousness of it was always with him.⁠ ⁠… But Paul was delirious with sunstroke, he remembered; it would be foolish to give him the stones just then.⁠ ⁠… As soon as that touch of the sun had passed, Michael reflected, he would give Paul the opals and explain how he came to have them.⁠ ⁠… + 